Official Teenager - August 5, 2023

Granddaughter #3 attained her teenage-hood this week.  Her birthday party is today.  She's getting a store-bought birthday cake this year, a fancy one with fondant and stuff.  In a little while, I'm going to pick up The Grandson in a little while, and we will go pick up the cake, which we will deliver before coming back to the hill to pick up Nanny.  

Nobody had invited Nanny to the party until I called her this morning to tell her what time we'd pick her up.  (Once again, we all assumed that someone else had done it.)  She started worrying about a card and a present.  I had just finished painting a card with some birds and peach blossoms on it and have an envelope that fits it.  Nanny jumped on the idea when I offered her the card. 

Here's the "practice" card I painted last night on the back porch in about 5 minutes.  Even smeared as it is, it's better than today's "real" card.  

I hope this party puts me in a better mood.  I have had the mulligrubbs all week.  The job.  The house.  The kids and grandkids.  Part of the problem may be that I have been stuck (voluntarily) in this house since January, when I started working from home.  Last week, I decided to join a painting class for a month.  This class is sort of a free-style thing, where people come in and paint whatever they want to paint in whatever medium they want to dabble.  It's been years since I have painted with acrylics and never was any good at it, but I saw a picture of some black-eyed Susans and decided to try to paint it with acrylics.  When I left the class last Tuesday, I'd painted the background, and it had turned out fairly well.  At home, the flowers didn't turn out so well, and the more I worked on them, the worse they got.  I finally just painted over all of them and hope to get some help at next Tuesday's class.   At this point, they have so many layers of paint on them they may be beyond fixing.

Painting with acrylics has a downside:  the clean-up.  Watercolors have spoiled me.  They can be left on the palette and re-hydrated when the mood to paint strikes.  Acrylics dry up before the day is over and cannot be used.  Before last week's class, I got a brand-new palette - I have a bunch of them, but they are all coated with dried paint, and I was ashamed to take any of them to class.  - and promised myself that I would keep the new one clean and not let paint dry on it.  

I failed.