I have been cheating on you. With another blog.

After my recent trip to Sicily,  I started my new travel blog, at Garden Nomad.net.

I'm excited because I love to travel, and wanted a place to ponder and write about travels, adventures, food...food adventures, travel food, food.

I'm still keeping this blog, tho she has been neglected for a while, because it is my "kitchen sink" blog. Where I can come to talk about anything.

And I do have garden posts I am planning in my head, and art and painting posts I want to make.  (Fluid acrylic painting is kind of new, and cool.)

But first let me talk about writing this last Garden Nomad post. Because writing is what this blog is about too. It was brutal.

I started out thinking I was writing an article about arriving in Palermo, with a little history, food, art, and photography thrown in. I was mistaken.

What happened was, all the grief journey and emotional stuff poured in, into my article and into my life.

Well, it is always there, and will always be a part of me. No surprise.

But it was really hard to finish, to blend into a cohesive whole, all of that. And so...I stopped.

Queen of writers, Procrastination, reared her head. I slept too late, played scrabble on my phone, scrubbed the floors, fought with my love. And while I went back into the computer file and sometimes did a little this and that, it was like a cat, hunched over and retching, tortuously retching, trying to get the thick mat of accumulated hair out.

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible."
            -Nabokov

Little Paintings and the Art Piano

Before I get to the paintings, I want to share this picture. I was so excited yesterday when I saw this hanging from the arbor. It doesn't look like much now, but these little fuzzy buds are the promise for a huge overgrown arbor full of fragrant purple clusters.


I painted small yesterday. Three 6x6x1.5 inch canvases. They went pretty well, and I hardly stressed over the painting at all. That might have something to do with the small size, but I think that staying in the art mode and having painted just a few days ago helps quite a bit.

That size canvas is just so cute.

Orientation?

Here they are inside after Edward and R had their way with them. I agree that they work fine this way too, but I had to insist that the last one stay with the blue on top. (Okay, I admit it, it looks not horribly wrong with the blue on the right edge as well.)

The art piano

I just had to take a pic of my piano covered in some recent paintings. And with a relaxed Edmund Hillary the crowning touch on top.