I’m noticing that I revert to quick sketches more often than careful studies. That’s not ideally what I wanted with this project when I started it (I wanted to see a development in realistic drawings), but logically it makes sense. I was over ambitious, I think, to believe I could do it all, and all at once – proportions, shading, blending, and so on. It is fatiguing. So, working on sketches actually is fine – once it takes less energy to sketch something proportionally, then I can spend more energy with the other components rather than getting bored and rushing through – which is what most of my criticisms are!

16. One of my new year changes is to write more letters. I shipped the first off on day 16!

17. I struggled with having no routine after my “early and temporary retirement” so I decided to spend the money and buy a planner. I’ve used planners off and on with varying success – mostly when I was a student to try to balance everything with homework requirements. I think it is something that you need practice with; I know for me I’ve gotten better using planners with more use (I use to think I wasted my money when I hardly used them!). This planner is great – it lets you set annual, monthly, weekly, and daily goals. I especially like the “This Week’s Top Three” and the “To-Do” column with boxes for each day (I always drew in my own boxes before so this was a fabulous change!). I’m not perfect at sticking to it, but it does help me stay intentional with my time. And, since it often feels like every day is a Saturday, it helps remind me that that simply isn’t true in the world of event scheduling!

18. I was on a reading hiatus for a bit, then I trudged through Glen Cook’s Black Company (I didn’t care for it). Then I tried Brian Jacques’s Red Wall (I think I missed the age time for that), and put it down to try Robert Jordan’s Conan the Magnificent (I was curious about a 1980’s fantasy book and it definitely shows its cultural age!). That wasn’t good either, but it was a believable world, at least. Order of events (mostly) made sense. The quality of writing was there, even if the story was pretty dumb in parts. So, I decided to finally try Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. I began Eye of the World many moons ago, I believe right after grad school when my mind was still mush. I got to page 47 (found a sticky note bookmark) before I gave up. But, so far, I am finally excited to read again, yay!

19. As I earlier stated, Boy makes me food all the time. He use to hate mushrooms. And now its something he sautés all the time! YUM.

20. Lately, I’ve been working at Boy’s office quite a bit to help him catch up with some extra work. I do a lot of random things around there – getting mail or making a bank run, Quickbooks, simple hardware things, basic webpage builds, and still learning FreeBSD. (My favorite thing to do there is make a food run;) But I chose to draw it because I am super proud of him to have built a company that pays for our lifestyle – especially with me not working currently. Running a company isn’t a piece of cake, and his stress levels sometimes show the work it takes, but he loves what he does and you can’t ask for anything more.