The leaves are turning

1.) Oh the rude awakening of shorter days and dropping temps. Still, my first real vacation in years was a perfect balance of warm days and crisp nights.

2.) Two nights before our wedding, we sat on our deck watching meteors, one of the planets (forgot which one of course) the milky way, and even the space shuttle and it was amazing.

3.) The coyotes still have their nightly sing somewhere nearby.

4.) I'm hoping all our tomato plants will fruit before we get into frost weather.

5.) The neighbor's velvety pristine lawn makes ours look hilarious. Someday I will master this arcane art known as 'landscaping.'

6.) One reason our lawn looks the way it does is a very good reason indeed. During vacation I actually got lots of work done on my current paintings: Lizard man & All good dogs. Have nearly worn out my Rasputina & the Decemberists' Crane Wife cd's in doing so.

7.) Rick is designing a new portfolio site for me, seeing as how we never got the last one up and running. The color palette is quite nice.

8.) Vacations are both wonderful and dangerous in that one never wants to have to work for anyone else again at all ever thank you very much, though I suppose it helps pay for the wonderful home & studio. Lets just say it's actually been rather inspiring.

My ex-boyfriend

Finally official: August 12th, 2007

So, courtesy of Rick's dad Spike, here are a few shots of the wedding. Our Justice of the Peace is a wonderfully nice lady, who looks positively angelic in these images.
Not sure where Rick's attention was at this point...












And something caused this expression but he doesn't remember what...














But all's well that ends well. (save for the damned panty lines.)

Afterwards it was off to Tiny Thai for lunch, then back to the house for cake. Ann & Spike had to head back to Massachussetts after lunch so they missed out on cake, which was rich chocolate with raspberry and crushed oreo for garnish. Lorrie was sweet enough to lend her parent's china bride&groom cake topper from 1938. Mom was awesome and took me out the night before to find shoes that were tall enough to get my dress off the ground. Our garden was kind enough to still be blooming!

Next up, the friends converge on our house for some food, music & so forth. Lots of food...

Goodness it's been a long time. How dare I scoff at other's dusty blogs when I myself am so very very guilty? The main reason I've held off is that I never manage to get pictures of my work (the reason this is called sweet enemy ART) scanned and sized. Arkonbey says go ahead and just write stuff. But I am not one for writing so much as I am one for reading the work of others.
So while I'm waiting for paint to dry ( no, really) I'll offer up some of my favorite web readings:

Mimi Smartypants
(excellent)

Minor Tweaks
(amusing, and writes for Salon.com, another good read)

Cerebral Smatterings
(Amazing artistic skills, found him through Illustration Friday)

Brass Goggles
(There are some people with amazing talent & focus out there)

&
Drawn!

Those last two are more aggregator sites of cool things, but certainly they will lead you to some interesting reading.

And finally, COMIX

Order of the Stick

PS238

There. At least I've updated. Now back to painting for a bit.

the studio

Here's a few shots of the studio, there are ones which dictate the size better, but this will do.
The view as you enter: just after I cleaned up and just before I decided to take down that red rug thing.

My new favorite spot, in disturbing collaged format. Now that I've made this area welcoming, the easel is getting quite a bit of use. It's usually set up by the door now within easy access of the paints. And the level of crap getting stuck in my paint has, as a result of working vertically, decreased greatly. Oh how I love this place.

Garden!

not a particularly artsy shot, but these poor things (at least five clusters or more!) have survived some nasty late-spring snowstorms, so I thought I'd document them at last.



This is something that was rather startling to find. (I'm thinking it's rhubarb) There are several of these, and they are fresh-blood red. I got to see some fresh blood just before discovering these, because Nabu, never known for eating what she catches, ATE WHAT SHE CAUGHT. I'm 50/50 between being grossed out, and being proud. She ate everything but the guts, something hard, and one teeny paw. That's my kitty. Being outdoors all day has apparently sharpened our instincts.


We discovered on our lawn a mysterious cache (really, a half-buried dumping) of seashells. Some are quite decent, but there are so many of them, I wonder if they ended up on the lawn because their previous owner just got overwhelmed. So I've put them to use as little markers for the plants that are starting to show up. The grass had grown up so long before we moved in that I didn't even know half this stuff was here. It's fabulous.

pictures, right?

I found a picture that wasn't ten zillion MB.

um, picture this?

...still have not had a chance to get pictures uploaded. I do have about three paintings on-going right now, plus a few that I'd finished previously. You'll just have to take my word for it until perhaps this thursday. That's when I can get onto arkonbey's computer and do all my image sizing/loading. This sweet laptop just doesn't have the power for it, but she can do so much, I can't complain.
The 15th annual VT Open Studio Tour will take place Memorial Day weekend, so I want to have everything up and finished for that. And so it goes...