New Steps, Sticky Drawings, Happy Birthdays and Flying Photocopies...

Today started VERY early around 4 am when a massive thunderstorm ripped through our area and dumped a deluge of rain and ground shaking booms that had Erin and I resetting our clock radios by flashlight while Bethany slept soundly on. Erin and I were a bit groggy once those alarms did go off a few hours later.

This morning, during a wonderful phone call with my patient sister, Bethany came tearing down the stairs to the office to ask if it was OK for there to be men in our driveway yanking the steps off the front of our house with a big truck!! I’d done some logo work for a company here in town and got a great deal on replacing our front step, but we’ve had no idea when that would happen all summer... so today was the day!!

I spent the rest of the morning working on the last drawing of the batch that Nanny Kay will review tomorrow morning, but had a “disaster” smear that I will have to take out in Photoshop once the image is scanned in. It’s on the very edge of the drawing and into the white space, so very easy to fix, but I know better than to try to hide it under a layer of gouache or liquid paper. That’s more likely to show that leaving it there. Still, the perfectionist in me is just totally annoyed. It was also very hot and humid, despite the storm that rolled through, so trying not to stick to the drawing or sweat on it was a challenge!

Once Erin got home from the morning sports camp, we called my niece in Provence to wish her a Happy Birthday. Juliette is now 5 and sounded SO grown up with her little French accent on the phone that I was worried I had the wrong number! Aunty Dragon was sad that she couldn’t be there for the occasion, but my Mom and John who are over there right now shared that the 45 (113) degree heat is a bit much even with the pool.

Suddenly, the humidity over hear didn’t seem so bad. I wish I could have kept my temper cool an hour later when the girls got into a massive fight over someone taking someone else’s Lego creation apart... I timed myself out for a good cry and soldiered on with very contrite girls who felt bad about making Mommy “blotchy”.

Erin even helped batch some leaflets tonight for an order, but we ran into a real problem. When you have the big fan on to keep you from dripping and sweating on things, it does tend to cause sheets of paper to fly about the room when you least expect it!

Just one more crazy episode in my life as an artist. When the pressure starts to get to me, I just watch an episode of Hell’s Kitchen!!!