Eating The Hippo...One Bite At A Time!!

OK... so putting a digital camera in the hands of a visual, creative person can sometimes be a goofy and strange thing... but I hope it makes you smile. The expression usually involves an elephant rather than a hippo, but I don’t have lots of stuffed elephants kicking around the house!

My Nanny loved hippos. She had a whole collection of them kicking around the house because family and friends would find hippo figurines, toys, puzzles, magnets etc. in their travels and bring them home to her as gifts. The few times that she actually saw real hippos during her lifetime (once even in the wild), she was rather disappointed that they weren’t as charming as the ones in the Disney movie FANTASIA!!


I found this little hippo two years ago and she usually sits in her little hippo hutch area just above my mouse. I haven’t stopped missing my grandmother since she passed away almost 6 years ago, but having a hippo handy makes me remember her with a smile instead of tears.

So why do I love that expression? Basically, it reminds me that any task, no matter how huge, can be accomplished one step at a time. That expression often calms me down during a bad panic attack of “I’ll never get it all done! There just aren’t enough hours in each day!! How will I handle this???”

Flipping the calendar over to June and getting the website updated reminded me that in just over 10 weeks, I will be heading to Charlotte with my family for a trade show.... so of course, I also looked at time frames for getting each illustration done for the book project and had just a teeny, tiny, itsy, bitsy panic attack. It’s really annoying when they hit between 4 and 5 am!!

This morning, even though every single interruption possible has made steady drawing time almost impossible, (attempted delivery of a parcel that wasn’t mine and I was not about to sign for... Erin calling from school to say that she’d split the seam of the capri pants she was wearing but Nick has the van in Petitcodiac, an automated phone call to inform me that I’d won an award of travel points if I would just call this certain number to redeem them..yeah.. right... a washer going off balance as I try to get laundry out of the way before it pours rain all weekend...) I’m still really satisfied with what I got sketched yesterday and looking forward to what will still get finished this afternoon. We are looking after a neighbour’s daughter after school for a few hours until her Dad gets off work, so Erin with have someone to play with once she recovers from the trauma of having people see her underwear. I have already loaded a few new CD-ROM adventures on the purple iMac we inherited from my sister, after my step father upgraded to a Mac mini, so Bethany will be able to have an hour of playing Jump Start or ISpy and learning while she plays.

“Date night” has been put off until Saturday night because Nick has yet another retirement even to attend for staff who are leaving Petitcodiac, so I will happily stay up and draw!! You just have to tackle problems on bite at a time and then move on to the next one. CHOMP! CHOMP! CHOMP!