Dexter

My friend, Colin, commissioned me to do this cat portrait for him as a gift for a friend.  Cats are easy and work up quickly, as it turns out.  Here he is, all done and ready to go.  This is the most artwork I've done in 2012, hands down.  Now I have another project to begin: a double portrait of two children that someone had won in a silent auction for the Midwife Center.  It's going to be fun.   Christmas is the deadline I set for myself (between working painstakingly slowly in watercolor, juggling my two jobs, and our European vacation, I think that's a reasonable timeframe).

Our Weed

Lately people have been commenting on Buggy's height.  Sure, she seems tall, but folks seem surprised to hear that she's only two and a half.  At just a bit under 36 inches, I just learned that she's beating the average of 33" for a three year-old girl by a good margin (and an inch shy of the 37" average for a four year-old).  Huh.  It must be all of those almonds and kale that she so loves.  Still, I'm not going to jump to conclusions about our child's ultimate height; my pediatrician declared to my mother, when I was two, that I'd grow to be six feet.  Yeah.  So in all likelihood she'll do her growing early and level off by the time she's twelve.

Sweet girl-goon.

My Neen

Today a remarkable girl turns thirteen.  For the past nearly two years I have been blessed with the opportunity to take care of this young lady (and her brothers, who are also pretty great).  Nina has instilled in me faith in the next generation with her intelligence, kind-heartedness, and work ethic, and sense of adventure (she just returned from a ten-day trip to Israel where she went to stay with a family she did not know) - traits that were not always very apparent to me in people her age.  She is devoted to her family, her church, her school, and to her future.  If Olive turns out half as mature, responsible, creative, and driven as she is by that age I will be exceedingly proud.  I'm so thankful that my daughter has an older girl to look up to.  Happy birthday, Sweet Neen!

Goal-Hopping

So remember back when I said I was going to try to run fifty miles each month?  I totaled up my mileage for July and was delighted to see that I ran seventeen!  Only thirty-three miles short - not bad.  It's been tricky for me to fit in runs this summer because I've been busy living the life of a gal in her mid-twenties, it seems.  I've had a unusually active social life this summer, much to my delight, spending my evenings with what became a pretty tight bunch of pals (comprised of folks from the trivia team and then some).  A lovelier lot of folks I've not found anywhere, and boy, do these kids know how to cook some food!  Several of them (Conrad, Morgan, Alex, Joanna, Colin) are leaving Pittsburgh or have already left (Dylan - boo hiss), most of whom are pursuing higher education at esteemed universities, but a good many will remain.  Because of these friendships, my summer has flown by and I'm left scratching my head over my thwarted running goals.  I'll run when I'm older, I suppose. But till then, and beyond, perhaps, I've made the decision to swear off sugar.  I'm nearly through AJ Jacobs' Drop Dead Healthy on cd, to which I've been listening in my car for the past several weeks and, while I knew the harm that sugar presents to the standard American diet, hadn't yet willed myself to take that step (I did eliminate sugar for about a month three summers ago but don't recall how I felt during or after).  Fortunately this doesn't require any sort of a time commitment the way the running does, so I feel confident that this is a goal I can achieve with more success.