It's been so long since I posted I almost forgot how to do it.

And this is an old picture, four years old maybe?

Some days I look around at my life and think is this it? And then other days - most of them, or more than the is this it days, anyway - those other days I look around and think how in the world could I want more, even if much of what I thought I wanted never happened and half the things that seemed so important for so long just don't seem to be such a big deal anymore.

Sun today, and birds.

Merry Christmas, almost.

Making some progress on the murals in the house, about 3/4 of the house is at about this sort of stage. Still working on the overalls thing, though. Can't seem to put into words just what I love about them. But patience and working a thing over and over until it's just right is part of it, so Niels, I hope you can wait a little longer, if you still want a piece for your book about the beautility of overalls.

Man. It's been a long time since I posted anything.

Sometimes I wish I wasn't such a flighty person, and could stick to something. Oh well, I have a tendency to come and go. Sometimes it seems like a good way to be, and sometimes not. Life is full of those sorts of things.

Apparently I've forgotten how to write anything sensible, if I ever knew that at all.

Oh well. I've got lots of new photographs to post, anyway. This isn't one of them, it's from my cell phone. I have to go searching for my new ones; I put them on a new external drive. My husband had to buy it because I'd used up all the space on the computer's hard drive with photos and videos, imagine that.

Working on murals and overalls-related things, muckwork and - of course - the ever-present laundry.

But I expect I'll be posting something more substantial than this, one of these days.

I'm going to have to get myself a nice little stepladder.

I've pretty much painted on all the walls in the house, some rooms more than others and some walls in greater detail, and some portions of some walls in layers of brushstrokes and colors.

For the most part I just transfer paint to the wall with the brush, using whatever sorts of strokes appeal to me in that moment, and usually without stopping much except to reload the brush. My brushes get ground down, because I work the paint into the texture of the wall, and fuss with it as it dries, and then scrub it off sometimes, either by painting over it and making a layer lift up or using the brush like a scraper.

And then things that look sort of like landscapes show up on the wall. I'm surprised, but not really, I mean I don't find it odd that my mind, left to its own devices would paint things that look like the world outside the house. I'm always staring off at the trees or the clouds or the birds strung on the lines waiting for someone to be brave enough to be the first one to swoop down for the breadcrumbs scattered on the still-frosted lawn.

One wall, though, I painted with more deliberate effort to create a scene. It's causing me the most trouble, because I keep wanting to abandon it, paint it all white and start over, and paint the way I usually do, like dreaming rather than telling a sensible story. But now that I've made the trees on that wall I feel responsible to them somehow, and so I keep fussing with them, and they're beginning to look more like trees, or at least more like the kind of trees you'd see as the backdrop in a puppet show, a retelling of some old fable.

Pardon the swooping camerawork. It was my left hand's doing.

“These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”

Walter Benjamin

Well I didn't meet my first, second, or third deadlines.

But. I did manage to finish the things I was working on - or if not finish (what's ever finished?) at least get them to point where I could pack them up and ship them off. It didn't cost as much as I thought, and the box was bigger than I'd realized, and I have no idea what sort of reception it's going to get when it gets to where it's going. (A puzzled one, is my guess.) Next time will be easier.

It occurs to me that this is the first time I've sent work off to stand on its own without me there to fuss with it. I expect that was some of the difficulty.