I Did It! 2023 Edition

It's time again for the annual pat-myself-on-the-back post. Past years can be viewed here: 2022, 2021 (Apocalypse Year 2) 2020 (Apocalypse Year 1), 2019 (including decade-in-review), 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013. Let's jump right into 2022's I Did Its! Shall we?

Andy Goldsworthy landscape installation at Alnoba in New Hampshire, here for no reason
other than it's a place I visited this year and never got around to writing about it. Also it's cool!

Writing I Did Its!

• Drafted a novel in my own version of National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO), which I called JANOWRIMO. (And I love it!)
• Finished revising and illustrating and writing a book proposal for my second nonfiction book, and submitted it to my publisher for consideration.
• Did some work on my idea for a third nonfiction book.
• Attended five book promotion events for Uphill Both Ways.
• Recorded two podcasts promoting Uphill Both Ways (one of which can be heard here, and one of which will come out soon!)
• Did a big freelance project.
• Freelance articles: 2
• Stories in the Snow
• Maine's Native Butterflies
• Essay Submissions: 5
• Essay Acceptances: 3
• Essay Publications: 
• "Faith in a Seed" Rooted 2: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction, Summer 2023 (reprint)
• "Inflection Point: The Birth of a Mother Writer" Literary Mama, March/April 2023
• Other publications: 
• "Growing an Essay" Rooted 2 Substack, December 2023
• "The Ever-Evolving Journey: An Interview with Majka Burhardt" Literary Mama, September/October 2023
• "Where Are They Now? An Interview with Anne Liu Kellor" Literary Mama blog, March 2023
• Residencies applied for: 3
• Residencies accepted into and attended: 1 (a little about it here).
• Newsletters: 10
• Blog posts: 27
• Workshops taught: 2
• Workshops taken: 2
• Got through >75% of my book coach training program.

Travel & Adventure I Did Its!

• We went to Europe!!! Can't really top that.

• Went on some local adventures to museums and other sites of interest around Maine, and one in New Hampshire, with family, friends, and on my own.
• Did *some* kayaking, but much less than in recent years.

Arts & Crafts I Did Its!

• Knit *one* pair of mittens!
• Took up mosaic-making (mosaicing?), and made three projects, including these two:

Other I Did Its!

• Got my older kid graduated from college and the younger two from high school. (Is this really my accomplishment? I don't care--I'm taking credit for it!)
• Got the younger two kids off to college.
• Hosted my parents for a couple of weeks in the spring (around those grads) and my sister for a few days in the fall.
• Created a true space of my own in the vacated bedroom.
• Maintained pretty regular yoga and walking routines (not-quite-daily).
• Kept a daily journal and a fairly regular morning pages routine.

I have some ideas about what I want to accomplish in 2024, writing-wise, and otherwise. But for now I'll just bask in the glow of self-congratulation for having written a novel and traveled to Europe and learned a new craft.

Finish It Friday ~ Mosaic Shelf

It is very strange that I have never blogged about my obsession with Fiesta ware dishes before, although they have made some appearances in the blog (notably in these posts: Kitchen Refresh, Getting the Plastic Out, and La Cocina en mi Casa). In any case, suffice it to say I have a pretty big obsession with Fiesta and a pretty big collection thereof. And, since I live with a clumsy man and three kids, I also have a pretty big collection of broken dishes, every one of which I've saved over the last 20 years for "someday" making a mosaic.

So when my friend Barbara set up a mosaic-making workshop with an artist friend of hers, I got out all my sad, broken dishes, sorted them by color, and gave them a bath.

Then I turned to Kaffe Fasset's book Mosaics for inspiration. The book includes a wall shelf project, and I just happened to have this sweet little wall shelf that used to hang in the kids' room, where it used to hold the antique toys C inherited from his grandfather. It was long ago evicted from the room and had been languishing in the basement.

To prepare it for mosaic, I first vandalized it by scoring the surfaces I was going to stick the tesserae (that's the fancy word for little tiles for mosaic; another fancy phrase I learned is pique asiette, which means mosaics made from items like broken dishes) to and then I painted it a nice, bright tangerine color with several coats of chalk paint. Then the fun began.

At my friend's mosaic gathering, I stuck shards (most of which I'd previously broken up) into mortar on the back panel of the shelf, with a butter dish finial and teacup handles for hooks. This mortaring part is what had held me back from trying mosaic on my own all these years, but it turned out to be incredibly easy. A lesson there.

At home later that week, I mortared pieces onto the outside panels of the shelf and then, later, grouted it all and touched up and waxed the painted surfaces. 

And now I just need to figure out where to hang it up--and what to mosaic next!

I Did It! 2022 Edition

For the past nine years, I've tracked my annual accomplishments via an annual I Did It! list, originally inspired by writer Lisa Romeo. Previous posts can be found here: 2021 (Apocalypse Year 2) 2020 (Apocalypse Year 1), 2019 (including decade-in-review), 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013. Let's jump right into 2022's I Did Its! Shall we?

Writing I Did Its!

My first book--Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail--was published, hurrah hurrah!

To all those people who say that publishing a book doesn't change your life, I say pppppbbbbttttsssttt! Almost nothing could be better, except maybe holding your newborn baby in your arms--I don't know, it's been a while since I did that ;-). Anyway, Oh, happy publication day and month and year!

Book Publicity Activities in 2022:

• 17 public book readings, signings, or author talks (some live, some virtual)
• 1 book club appearance
• 1 video interview
• 1 podcast interview
• 4 print interviews

(See all past and future events here and read/watch/listen to interviews and recorded events here.)

I also did some more revision on Book Two, which I mention having completed drafting in last year's I Did It! post, and I decided to illustrate it (I was wavering for a bit) and began work on those illustrations, basically, teaching myself how to draw in pen. I'm still a bit wishy-washy on how I feel about the results so far, but I'm making progress. I also drafted a book proposal for Book Two, which I haven't sent out, due to working on getting enough illustrations done to my satisfaction first.

I began Book Three, meaning I outlined it and began the research, which is really just a LOT of reading. I've also drafted a very sketchy intro and part of Chapter 1. It's a book I've been dreaming of putting together for nearly two decades, so I'm excited to finally be making progress. 

I started the year with a plan to focus on writing short pieces (essays, stories, etc.), since I couldn't wrap my brain around the idea of a big book project while working on promotion of Uphill Both Ways, but obviously I overcame that block and ended up working on two book projects after all. My plan was to write one short piece a week, in addition to a flash piece on this blog ("Flash Friday"). That did not exactly come to pass, but in a file labeled "2022 Short Works," there are 15 documents, 11 of them complete pieces. In addition, I wrote 5 "Flash Friday" posts, for a total of 20 partial or complete short works, or just shy of two per month (and one of those "short" works is nearly 10,000 words).

This practice probably led to an improved submission and publication rate over last year:

• Submissions: 16 (double last year's rate)
• Acceptances: 3
• Rejections: 8
• Publications: 9 (so much better!). They are:

• "100 Words of Writing Advice" Literary Mama blog, January 2022

• "From the Editor" Literary Mama, May/June 2022
• "Stay Together, Learn the Flowers, Go Light" The Art of Everyone, May 2022
• "Alligator Pear" Stonecrop Review, June 2022
• "River Revival: Clean Water Act 50th Anniversary" Green and Healthy Maine Summer Guide, Summer 2022
• "10 of Maine's Best Lakes to Visit" Green and Healthy Maine Summer Guide, Summer 2022
• "Citizen Scientists Key to Maine's Clean Lakes" Green and Healthy Maine Summer Guide, Summer 2022
• "Five Hundred Miles" Deep Wild, July 2022 (reprint)
• "'Mother Brain' delves into the science of how our brains are rewired by parenthood" Maine Sunday Telegram, October 2022

(As always, the submission/acceptance/rejection/publication numbers don't add up due to carry over from year to year, not everything published having gone through a normal submission process, etc.)

Other Writing I Did Its!

• 11 Newsletters (so far)
• 44 Blog Posts (including this one)
• I continued working as Literary Reflections editor and senior editor at Literary Mama
• The writing group I started in 2021 (Maine Writers and Knitters) got together in person about three times and once over zoom, including one fantastic field trip to a local historic author's residence/museum
• I applied for two grants (and was rejected for both)
• I completed just over half of a (self-paced) book coach training program
• I gave a presentation and taught a workshop at my grad school alma mater
• I taught a nature writing workshop to two different groups 

Travel and Adventure I Did Its!

• I spent 10 days in Mexico (and didn't write about it much here on the blog; but I have an extraordinarily long essay about the trip that's in my rejections pile).
• We went on our annual family camping trip 
• C and I went on a 2-day backpacking trip, kid-free
• C and I spent a weekend in Bar Harbor for alumni weekend, also kid-free
• I took some small trips on kayak and on foot here and there

It took me a minute to remember that I went on a BIG trip at the beginning of the year, which tells me I'm either ungrateful or I need to go on big trips more frequently. I definitely need to work harder to make adventure a priority. And keep a list!

Arts and Crafts I Did Its!

My focus was on writing more than making, and my sewing machine spent most of the year tucked away on a side table under a dust cover. But I got some things done:

• Finished knitting the gigantic poncho I started early in the pandemic
• Made some tiny shoes and knitted a tiny sweater (and deciphered an Elizabeth Zimmerman pattern!) for my niece, who was born in September
• Knitted a runner hat for Z (and then the weather was warm through cross-country season, so he never had an occasion to wear it, officially, but he has worn it some since the weather has gotten cold)
• Made a new duvet for C's and my bed
• Made a fleece skirt, plus two more for gifts
• Made a silly little (and totally impractical) bird feeder, just for fun

Household I Did Its!

• Deep-cleaned the kitchen in anticipation of Thanksgiving and houseguests
• Cleaned and organized drawers and cabinets in the bathrooms--long overdue
• Moved several boxes of books and bags of clothes to the used bookstore and consignment shop, respectively
• Finally made inroads on cleaning the basement (the perennial to-do list item, which I claimed to have done last year--the inroads part--but this year I really made some progress)
• Tried to be more systematic about menu planning and shopping so that figuring out what to have for dinner every night isn't such a chore; this doesn't make me excited about cooking dinner any more than I was before, but it makes it slightly less stressful
• Worked on maintaining my houseplants in a healthier, less neglected state than usual (battling some pests like scale and spider mites), even moving a few from the sunroom to the living room to enjoy them more (and because they seemed to want warmer weather conditions)
• Expanded my pollinator garden, fed it a few rounds of duck mulch, and largely stayed on top of the weeds

Nature I Did Its!

• Bird-Watching: 132 checklists and 114 species for the year (in eBird) as well as several new species sightings in Mexico (around 25)
• Did a little butterfly and dragonfly wildflower watching
• Taught a nature writing workshop to 3 different groups
• Made 25 nature journal entries
• Continued to serve on board of Maine Master Naturalist Program and helped organize their conference

All-in-all a pretty good year (can't really complain when you've published a book)! It's occurred to me, for the first time after ten years of these posts, unbelievably, that in planning my goals from this year, I can think about what I want this post to look like next December and reverse engineer it so that I aim for what I'll have wanted to accomplish. For instance, I want to see more travel and adventure in my life, so I can set a goal of X number of hikes/kayaks per week or month and X of overnight trips and X real big expeditions. And then make it happen!

Book Illustration Giveaway!

Once a month between now and when my book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail, comes out in March, I’ll give away an 8x8 inch matted art print of one of the book’s illustrations. This month is Alpine Springbeauty. To enter, just subscribe to my newsletter by midnight, October 31. 

I Did It! 2018 Edition

For the past several years, I've paused at the turn of the year and, before listing my goals for the upcoming year (and instead of berating myself for those things left undone from the previous year), I've made a list of accomplishments and goals achieved (originally inspired by this post from blogger and writer Lisa Romeo), both with regard to writing and other things in life.



Writing I Did Its

Books written: 1

My one, overarching goal for 2018 was to finish writing my book, and…I did it! I completed a full draft in June, subjected it to one round of revision, and then sent it off to two writing friends for suggestions and further edits. I subsequently sent off queries to several agents. No bites so far, but I have plans for deeper revision and further querying in the new year.

The focus on finishing the book, meant that my efforts in other writing areas lagged a bit:

Submissions: 14
Rejections: 7
Acceptances: 2
Publications: 3 essays:

"Memento Vivere" Still Point Arts Quarterly
"The Sparrow's Song" The Sunlight Press
"The World in their Hands" Nature Writing ​(republished)

 I launched a freelance career and enjoyed its brief glow before I had to go get a real job, producing 5 pieces:

"Sharing a Love of Wilderness" and "Naturalist's Notebook" Maine Wilderness Guide
"Jargon: Anatomy of a Mountain" TrailGroove
"Rachel Carson's Maine" Green and Healthy Maine Summer Guide
"Becoming a Trail Naturalist" TrailGroove
"Reduce, Recycle, Retire" Green and Healthy Maine Homes

I also taught four nature journaling workshops, including two in quite ideal circumsances—one on a sea kayak excursion and another on a weekend in a cabin up north.

Other writing numbers:

Writing residencies applied for: 1
Residencies accepted to: 0
Grants applied for: 2
Grants received: 0

I did earn more than twice what I made the year before from writing and teaching—not enough to live on, but a kind of nice bump in the otherwise nonexistant income. I made an attempt to keep a little toe in the literary world by attending a few writing workshops and presentations/panels, as well as the nearby annual poetry festival.

Travel I Did Its!
This was a poor year for travel, being a poor year, literally. All of our trips were fairly local: our usual May camping trip and visit to the in-laws' camp, and another camping trip with friends, plus a trip to Boston in February to visit colleges with M and a family expedition to Vermont this summer for a funeral/family reunion/more college visits, as well as trips to the beach and other day trips.

Art and Craft I Did Its!
For the second year, I participated in The 100 Day Project, this time drawing each day. In the end, I think I only accomplished somewhere around 85 days, and they were nowhere near consecutive, but I did improve greatly on my pencil drawing skills.

I haven't had much of a crafty year. The only knitting I did was preemie hats for the twins' class to donate to the hospital. I also finished up E's quilt, made a fun (but perhaps not that professional) farm quilt for a friend's new baby, and put together the quilt you see at the top of this post, which I'll get back from the quilter any day now, and which I'll tell you all about soon.

Tell me about your 2018 I Did Its!

Best of the Blog ~ Kid Art Embroidery

Over the last few weeks of blogging, I thought I'd revisit a few of my favorite posts. Since it's the holiday season—and who doesn't start a new craft project two weeks before Christmas?—I thought I'd harken back to one of my very favorite crafts—embroidering my kids' drawings. I've had so much fun over the years working with my kids' art and transforming it into decorative household objects.

I love these projects because kid art is so great, and tracing over it with floss and needle allows you to spend a lot of time noticing the details and character in their work. And, honestly, it's nice to sit and focus on something sweet and simple that has nothing to do with the horribleness of the world. It's good therapy—and cheap therapy. I encourage you to try it.

Don't worry if you lack sewing skills—if you can thread a needle and tie a knot, you can embroider. To get started, see: 

Kid Art Embroidery How-To

I'll admit, there's a limited range of finished projects you can make with the art once you've embroidered it (for a while I thought of doing a quilt with embroidered squares alternating with printed fabric, but that never happened). Some things you can make with your embroideries:

Wall Hangings (rotated seasonally):

Autumn Wall Hanging
Santa Wall Hanging
Pirate Wall Hanging

Table runners and placemats:

Halloween Table Runner
Thanksgiving Table Runner
Christmas Table Runner
Christmas Placemats

Pillows

 Owl and Pussycat Pillow

(Sadly, this pillow has gotten completely destroyed by use—the embroidery floss worn off, the white linen shredded; I don't recommend a pillow project in a household of—er—active people).

One of my favorite things about blogging and reading blogs has been getting inspired to try new things and learn new skills. Kid art embroidery is just one of those things I might never have discovered if it weren't for bloggers out there sharing their work.

Wild Wednesday ~ Nature Journal Recharge

A few weeks ago, our family attended a presentation by the naturalist Bernd Heinrich. After the talk, I picked up from the book sale table a copy of Heinrich's recent book collaboration with ecologist Nathan Wheelwright, The Naturalist's Notebook, which is a how-to guide for tracking nature's changes (phenology), with a five-year calendar/journal in the back.



It's a lovely, lovely book, with gold-edged pages and (my favorite) a built-in ribbon bookmark, illustrated with Heinrich's sketches and watercolors throughout.

While most of the information wasn't new to me, having read a lot of books about nature journaling and having gone through the Maine Master Naturalist program, I always appreciate a refresher and I especially liked the ideas of experimentation and citizen science presented throughout the book—ways of taking your nature experience beyond appreciation and observation.


I had been in a bit of a nature-journaling rut and just looking at Heinrich's illustrations inspired me to get out and get sketching.

The months I spent learning to use watercolor paints last winter finally paid off—this is the first time I've tried using them in a journaling format (other than a few stray and unsuccessful experiments over the years) and coincidentally, the art store changed brands of my preferred field notebook, to one with heavier pages that take the paint beautifully.



Heinrich describes his art supplies thus: "I use only number 2 pencils with erasers or Micron 01 indelible ink pens. I have eight brushes (but use no more than three) and two watercolor sets. Each set …holds 24 colors…. Most likely I received both sets as gifts when I was a teen and there is still enough paint left in both to last another lifetime…."



This inspired me to rethink my art supplies and drawing tools. Not that I have an excess of either, but I really do love trying out different media and adding to my large colored pencil collection.



So I've been experimenting with watercolor and number 2 pencil, and watercolor and colored pencils.



And I've been working on making the most of my different watercolor sets (three travel sets of various smallness, and a palette of colors squeezed from tubes), learning the different characteristics of each and figuring out how to maximize color combinations, especially with the little travel sets.

Most importantly, I've been using my journal to help me appreciate the natural world during these waning days of autumn and learn a little more about the world around me.

October in Review

October seems to have gotten away from me—there were many things I meant to post about, but somehow never got around to it.


It was a beautiful month, sunny and dry, until it wasn't (more about that in a minute). I got the kids to walk through our woods a few times and we even went on a family hike once (I have mentioned how no one likes to leave the house, haven't I?). Unfortunately, I didn't take along my camera for documentary evidence.

E and Z and I did a Van Gogh art project, with various interpretations of what that meant.

And we all made tie-died t-shirts, which is so much easier now, with squirt-bottles of concentrated dyes, than last time I tried it, 30 years ago, with dipping shirts in and out of buckets of watery Rit.

C and I did our best to wrangle the last of the garden produce. He made several large batches of tomatillo salsa and I boiled or roasted the rest of the tomatillos and froze them for winter cooking.


With the last of the VERY LARGE harvest of chile peppers (jalapeño and habanero), I made hot pepper jellies, hot sauces, roasted and frozen peppers, and dried peppers. That was a lot of peppers.



With the end of the month came a crazy wind-and-rain storm, which knocked power out for most of the state, littered roads with fallen trees and downed power lines, and drove most of the leaves off the trees (though the beech and oak hung on tight).


The upshot for us was NO SCHOOL for this whole week, with power out almost everywhere (except, thank you sun and solar panels and batteries, our house) and roads too hazardous for buses to pass through.

Three people in our house were pretty psyched about this development. I even got into the spirit of it for the first couple of days, playing Snow Day, baking cinnamon rolls and watching movies, but a whole week with a houseful of kids (and no internet) put a serious dent in my work flow.



Despite calls here and there to postpone Halloween until Friday (to which we said "Phooey"), we braved the dark and tree-littered streets to make our usual trick-or-treat rounds.



Our usual hay wagon being unavailable, we made do with C's work truck, which worked out nicely, as grown-ups got to sit inside for once (although it was such a mild night, it wouldn't have been bad to be in a trailer).



The power outages and candle-lit homes made for an extra-spooky Halloween-i-ness, and I think people appreciated a diversion from sitting around in their dark houses, listening to their generators run. And I think the kids appreciated being part of a lower-than-normal turnout that led to even more candy in their buckets than usual.

Trying New Things

The 100 Day Project is a worldwide collective art project in which participants do something creative every day for 100 days and post about it on Instagram. There are no rules and what you do is completely up to you. I first heard about it sometime last year, after reading The Crossroads of Should and Must (the author, Elle Luna, is one of the organizers), but I didn't join in because I was getting ready for our big trip.

This year the project began on April 4, the exact same day I finished The Artist's Way, which was too much of a coincidence to pass up. I spent some time mulling over what kind of creative project I would want to work on every day for 100 days. I considered nature journaling, a poem-a-day, a flash fiction a day, sketchbook, and watercolor. The writing ideas didn't inspire me—I've been writing every day for a very long while and I've done a poem-a-day twice before for National Poetry Writing Month—I've also nature journaled (nearly) every day for a whole year before. I wanted to do something new and challenging and watercolor painting drew my interest more than anything else: I've always wanted to learn, but have never had the patience. This would be my chance: If I can't figure it out in 100 days (that's like 3.25 months!!), then I never will.

Still, after coming to that decision, I still had some resistance, mainly to do with the mess and the hassle of getting out paints, setting up, cleaning up. I resolved this by buying a super cheap watercolor set with lots of colors. I know it's generally preferable to use high-quality art supplies when learning, but these $5 paints helped me overcome the mess and setup issues and also made it okay to make a mess and "waste" paint, which a $75 set would tie me up in knots about.

So far it's been fun and I've learned a bit. It's also really hard. It requires patience and an understanding of how the paint behaves. I'm still in the stage of trying to control the paint. I have not graduated to the level of working with the paint to create the effects I desire. I alternate between lessons I found on some random website and just playing around with the paint. I prefer the playing around to the lessons, but I am beginning to understand why piano teachers make you learn scales before you can play songs—a solid foundation is helpful.

The picture above is in the playing around category. It's my second attempt. The first ended up a muddy mess. (When I turned the page to start again, E said, "Don't be a quitter, Mom." I showed him that I finished the first painting, but I wanted to do it again to make it better. Later he said I should get a job as a book illustrator. "I've seen some drawings in books that are way worse than yours. Or maybe you can be a butterfly painter." Aww, kids.)

Forty days in, I've hit a bit of a lull. Or maybe it's a plateau. I feel less compelled to do a painting every day (and I even missed a day this weekend!). It may be time to mix things up, get out the tube paints (or at least the slightly higher-quality travel watercolors), take a real lesson, or establish some sort of goal or theme.

Have you tried something new lately, started a new hobby, or set a creative goal for yourself?

You can see more on Instagram @andrea.lani and #100daysofandrealearningtopaint

Also see #the100dayproject and check out all the cool, crazy, and creative things people are doing.

On My Desk

My Artist's Way week starts on Wednesday, and so I've made it a little ritual to, in addition to reading that week's essays and schedule all of the exercises and tasks for the week, clear the decks—or at least my desk—in anticipation of the week's creative recovery. The clearing doesn't last long (a clean surface is like a blank canvas around here, just waiting to be ornamented in hats, napkins, water glasses, tea mugs, homework, candy wrappers, piano music, trumpets, and all manner of flotsam and jetsam), but this is a little glimpse of  my desk after I cleared it this week.

John Muir Laws Guide to Drawing Birds, which I pulled off the shelf Wednesday afternoon and started reading. Because just one self-improvement activity is not enough, I've decided to draw one bird a day for the next year, as recommended by Laws. The only trouble: we ran out of bird seed in the last few days and I haven't wanted to go out in the snow to get more, so the birds don't stick around very long (thus the blank journal page).

And yet another daily, or nearly daily, activity: Cassie Premo Steele's book, Earth Joy Writing. I've had it for a couple years now, but have only just started doing the exercises regularly.



Natural Abundance. This is one of The Artist's Way tasks for this week: find five rocks and five leaves. Reminders that the world is abundant. The rocks were easy—our house is full of them and all of these were on the windowsill above my desk (I gave them a good dusting). The one on left is a green-and-red heart(ish) shaped one I found on the Colorado Trail. The leaves had blown off the beech and oak trees after the snow stopped falling and were littering the driveway when I went out for a walk yesterday—true natural abundance!



An invitation to a reunion at my MFA program this summer and nice things that three of my mentors wrote in my final evaluations (I had four mentors; one did not say anything nice, but the other three make up for that). This was also an exercise from The Artist's Way, and it was well-timed.



Finally, I had a little money in my PayPal account from some editing work I did, but it didn't last long. Part of it I spent on these cards. The one on the left is "Persist" by Nikki McClure. I used to have the same image, torn from a calendar, in a frame at my desk at work. I passed it on to a co-worker when I left, thinking I wouldn't need to persist in my new life, but last week was a reminder that women face many obstacles and we must always persist. The one(s) on the right are Stand Up Postcards by Maine artist (and fellow COA-grad) Jennifer Judd-McGee. I sent one to my Senator earlier this week and I plan on sending the rest to friends over the next few weeks. I'll also send one to the first person to leave a comment on this blog (with your email so I can get in touch to get your address).

Snow Days

Out of the last nine weekdays, all three kids have only gone to school two.

Three days all three of them had snow days; two days either one or two of them did; and the other two days, they had early release.

Needless to say, I haven't been getting much done these last couple of weeks.

(And next week is school vacation!!)

I should, in theory, I suppose, be able to work when they're around, but I can't. Or not much anyway.

It's "Hey, mom…" every few minutes.



And even when they're not bothering me, I feel obligated to engage them in other activities so they don't turn into total screen zombies (which, I admit, is a serious danger right about now).



And then there is the bickering, and the need to feed them occasionally.



So I heave them outside on a regular basis (and myself, too, because a daily dose of light—no matter how dim—and fresh air and body movement is essential to surviving February).


Last week's Artist's Way question was: what is your favorite creative block? That was an easy one: my kids. What to do about it (which the book doesn't ask, not yet anyway) is another question.

This is the best I could do for a Valentine heart this year. Can you see two of them?

In addition to outside time and puzzles and games and movies we all watch together (which feel a little healthier than each to his own screen), I've tried to engage them in a little creativity, both to keep them busy and to help me in my creative recovery.



One of The Artist's Way activities is to create an image file where you store pictures of things you want or that represent who you want to be or what you want to do. I figured, why create a file when you can make a collage? And E and I spent a happy evening cutting up old magazines and gluing the pictures onto big paper. My collage, necessarily tending toward nature and birds and travel, because that's what kind of magazines we had available to us, tells a little story about what kind of life I'd like to lead.



"Make art" is a phrase that keeps popping up in my mind—and in my Morning Pages—when I think about how I want to spend my time, and I was able to get all three boys engaged in a little painting project with me (when paint and canvas are involved, I can usually even get M to play along). I'd had an idea for monochromatic landscape paintings, based on a project E and Z had brought home from art class a while ago, and gave each of them a cool paint color, plus white, and had them draw a series of mountain lines.



We started with white with just a little color mixed in for the sky, and then added more color as we moved toward the bottom of the painting (foreground). I suppose I should have talked about value a little more, and maybe it would have made sense to pre-mix the different values to ensure there was enough of a range, but, well, I'm not an artist or art teacher, so we bungle along as best we can. I was left with black (though I thought sure M or Z would pick it) and it was surprisingly a lot more interesting to paint with than I expected.



Z had the idea of adding snow to his—using a mostly-empty squeeze bottle of acrylic paint, and I thought it was a pretty good idea (especially considering the blizzard swirling around outside at the time). E suggested I use an old toothbrush to flick paint on my canvas to make the snow (a trick he learned from a former art teacher), so it was a fun, collaborative project and we all learned from each other.

Another aspect of The Artist's Way is to take a weekly "Artist's Date" all by yourself. I had planned  an extended Artist Date for last Friday, thinking I'd head down to the coast, but I wanted to get some work done at home while the kids were actually at school, and it was brutally cold and windy (not a nice beach day, in other words), so instead I took a shortened date to a nearby not-quite-coastal (but on a tidal river so it feels like it is) town, where I sat in my warm car with hot tea and ate  sticky bun while watching ducks on the river and writing in my journal. I also went to a book store, which I seem to do every Artist Date, but was very good and didn't buy anything.