I haven’t reallly fallen off the Earth, but almost.  For me, this has been a really weird year.  Certainly, all the pandemic stuff that preceded it messed with my mind more than I thought but weather and life contributed to this year being, what was the word…oh yeah…WEIRD.

I came out of the pandemic looking to spend the spring/summer/fall out sketching like I normally do, but I never really got into that groove.  Partly this was because of near constant rain from April to June.  We had an amazing flower crop, though, and I dodged the rain to draw some of them.

By the time the rain stopped we felt pressed to get the housework we’d planned to get done in the spring and so everyday was spent with construction tools or paint brushes in my hand.  We got a lot accomplished but not nearly as much as we’d planned.  Anyways, we followed this with several picnics and other “we need to just hang out” actvities.  Gals prices were too high to go anywhere so we didn’t. Should I blame Biden for our Quebec $6+/gal prices or credit him for the fact that they used to be $7.50/gal?

I resumed daily walking and during it I did a bunch of little sketches but I wasn’t too interested in scanning them and posting them.  To be honest, social media is kinda getting to me.  It’s become a steady stream of artists replacing posts of their finished products with frantic videos, sped up to a stess-inducing rate of scribbling and I just can’t watch this stuff.  That, I guess is a topic for another discussion.

And then it got to be late August and September when we got a surprise.  Just as cool/cold should have been setting in here, it got warm and beautiful.  It was so nice that Chantal and I couldn’t resist spending the day in the backyard sipping wine, reading books and enjoying the sun.  So, rather than a daily sketcher, I’ve become a daily reader…a serious daily reader – hours at a time.  Here are a few of my new friends.  Just a different way to feed the mind and now I want to draw Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (grin)