I'm at one of those points where I haven't posted for so long that it would be hopeless trying to catch up. In March I had the surprise party for Christian and it was a lot of fun. In April/May I went to Hamburg and Paris. Great trip! I took about a thousand pictures and if I get organized I'll post some here.

Things are blooming in the rain and today I'm going to the art museum. :-)

Here's a painting I started last summer and finished yesterday. It's 24x36". Sometimes I'm amazed at the stretch of time that passes before I unearth a painting again. I tend to set them aside because I'm not sure what I want to do next, then eight months later I rediscover them and realize they're almost done. Maybe they just need that resting time. :-)

I posted this photo on Facebook and a friend on there said that moss can catapult its spores. Of course I had to look for a video of that.

Here's an article with a couple of videos.

Macro photography has opened up a whole new world to me. The closer I get, the weirder plants are!

Eight-year-old Aidan has been on a roll this morning. He woke me up by climbing into bed with me and here's some of the conversation:

"Remember how I said I wanted to get a hypnotizing ray and take over the world?"
"Mmhm..."
"I realized I should just let people be who they are."


"My friend thinks he's a robot. I know I'm not a robot. Because I know my body. I can't open myself, I have human emotions, I can cry, I can feel love...Robots can't feel love."


"Someone needs to make my lunch."
"Hm, who's going to do that?"
"Mom, you know how important it is for me to go to school. Now please pretend I didn't say that."

I love online shopping because I'm lazy, I don't like crowds, and often there's a better selection and/or better prices online. After reading this article about the conditions in the warehouses where those online orders are fulfilled, I'm reminded that every modern convenience we enjoy is made possible by other people's suffering, or by damage to the environment. Often by both.

Cell phones, computers, and other electronics depend on minerals mined in poor African countries. And they're manufactured under terrible conditions. After they're discarded, these items go back to poor people in China and Africa to be picked apart so some elements can be resold.

Meat is cheap because animals are kept in miserable conditions and slaughtered inhumanely, after being raised on a diet that's harmful to the environment.

Gold and diamonds come to us through exploitation and pay for civil wars.

We can buy new clothes all the time because sweatshop labor in China, Malaysia, etc, keeps them cheap.

Chocolate from the mainstream companies like Hershey, See's, Nestle, Lindt, Ghiradelli, and others is affordable because the beans are cultivated by slave labor in Africa.

And now it turns out that when I buy a book from Amazon and I'm thrilled that it arrived in two days, it's because a poor person in a warehouse was driven to the breaking point to meet their quota.

I'm not trying to preach, it's just overwhelming how tangled up it all is. Sometimes it seems like the only way to avoid exploiting people is to move off the grid and live like a hermit. But instead, I'll just try to forget about all this and tell myself I'm doing the best I can.

Ha, I don't even have a tag for this because I don't tend to write about such things here.

I only seem to be able to have one day of productivity at a time. After one virtuous day of cleaning, organizing, running errands, writing, or whatever, my brain thinks the next day must naturally be a day to do something different. Usually goof off.

So the fact that I was totally on track yesterday and wrote 6000 words and the ideas flowed means that today...I didn't want do to any writing at all. I did that yesterday! Surely today must be for walking in the sunshine or organizing the clutter in the bedroom.

It reminds me of this one from Hyperbole and a Half which I will love forever for the line that I used as a title here. Plus: "I did three things yesterday! Now I'm supposed to keep doing things? It's like the things never end!"

Exactly.

Some color for a winter day. :-)

At the end of January I got the writing bug and decided to use February to write a NaNoWriMo style novel. Except that instead of 50k words, like a normal novel writing month, I decided to do 80k words. This is because I thought it would be a rewrite of a story I'd already done a couple of drafts of, and I wanted a full-length manuscript out of it. Also, I am a crazy person.

This goal seemed reasonable because I planned to write from an outline, so it would be easier to stay on track. Well, toward the end of the first week I changed the whole setting, got several new characters, realized my main character wasn't all that interesting, and threw out the outline. Since then it's been less of a novel and more like 80,000 words of character development.

That's not a bad thing, since I'm often too lazy to do as much background work as I should to flesh out the characters. But it's HARD. Hard to write so much with no plan, hard to write so much, period.

Did I mention that it's also set in the 1860s? So I have to squash my research-fanatic tendencies and put in a lot of probably-inaccurate detail that will need to be fixed later. This makes me itch.

I have five and a half days and 25k words left to go. The weird thing is, when the month is over I'm going to miss it.

Portland is having our annual false spring, where we get a couple of weeks of sunshine in February before four more months of rain start. It's been great to be able to get outside and enjoy what feels like balmy weather.

Yesterday Christian and I took Aidan to the wetlands for a walk. Most of the area was flooded, which really changed the landscape. I've been enjoying the starkness of the winter trees and the bleached grass. Although summer here is wonderful, weather-wise, it's my least favorite season to take pictures because the leaves cover everything.

Going to the beach today was a good decision. It was sunny with almost no breeze so 55 degrees felt balmy to us. Aidan was disappointed at first that he couldn't go into the water but he ended up being happy walking along the beach with a stick, poking holes in the sand and running away from the waves.

Right when we got there, a man was standing looking away from the ocean taking a picture when a big wave came in and sloshed all the way up around his ankles, soaking his shoes and pants. His wife thought it was hilarious. That's why you don't turn your back on the Pacific!

Bill's Tavern in Cannon Beach has the best fish and chips I've eaten. I have to admit that part of the reason for driving over there today was to try them again. :-)