Sigh… the couple of you who have checked will know that I haven’t been active here lately. That’s mostly because my pen hasn’t been active because I haven’t been much in the mood to sketch anything.

Nothing seems worth sketching and certainly not worth presenting to an audience that, in my opinion, have lost their way. It’s like there are 300 million people, living south of my border who are sitting around fiddling as their country falls apart, but every one of them thinks they’re right. This isn’t a political blog and never will be but the daily news of US events has certainly had an impact on my view of the world.

And so I’ve turned to other things. I mentioned a while ago that I’d gotten back to reading a lot, and I have. I’ve gone through many f the classic “big books” and have been enjoying the journey. When I read War and Peace I fell in love. It’s an amazing book that 1) isn’t big when compared to Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, 2) isn’t a “war book,” though a war is taking place as the backdrop to half a dozen characters deal with love, philosophy, and free will vs fate. Mostly it’s a book with characters that are so real and complete that you just want to keep reading about them, even though you’ve finished the book.

And I have. I now own 4 translations of Tolstoy’s masterpiece and I’ve been enjoying casual analysis of how the different translators portray the work. Kinda crazy, I know, to get that wrapped up in one book but if you’ve read it you may understand it a bit better. It could also be the case that the Russian/French war of 1812 is just easier to handle than the evening news (grin).

I’ve also been doing some cooking because I bought a new toy, a Ninja Foodi airfryer/pressure_cooker.

I love this thing. It’s essentially a small convection oven with a pressure cooking lid and you can fry, bake, broil, sear, steam and more. Slowly I’m learning to use it and most of what I’ve done with it comes out better and faster than using an oven and with less mess, oil, there’s no heating up the kitchen as you do it. Lots of fun.

Now that our snow is beginning to melt, I’ll probably be getting out sketching. In the meantime, here’s are a couple doodles I did in the name of Marc Holmes’ 100 people event. While I didn’t participate, these three dripped off my pen/pencil.