Commission and Taking a Break Until March 3

This is my neighbor's site,

http://dappered.com/

Sarah's job ended before Christmas, so now she works with Joe, and his site makes enough money for them both to support themselves. Go figure. Kind of reminds me of Maxim magazine.

Yesterday I finished a larger version of the baby geese study,


It is still only 7.5 inches by 10.5 inches. I thought the water came out a bit groovier than I intended, but I was going for more graphic and then didn't really like it. I liked it better once the grass was in, but mostly I just wanted to get the fuzziness and light of the goslings, which I did.

Two days of rain washed away the snow by last weekend. It has been raining off and on since then, which is making it feel like Spring. In a week, the snow on the mountains caught up to normal. The weatherman here will say, today the sun might come out, or it might be cloudy, or it might rain or snow, and some days he will be completely right. That is Idaho. If the sun is out, there is almost enough daylight after work to walk, it just has to be in the upper 40's, the lower 40's are too cold. I went for a walk this afternoon, with my gloves and earmuffs, but my face still feels warm.

Last week, at 4 am Saturday morning, and again at 6 am Sunday morning, the fire alarms in my house went off. Nothing like waking up to a fire alarm at 4 am to ruin your day, and two days in a row will ruin your weekend. They went off long enough to wake me up, and then went off. Did you know you are supposed to test your fire alarm every week? Who does that? After half a day of reading manuals on line, I cleaned the outside of the alarms and replaced all the batteries. It should not have been the batteries, the alarms were not chirping, but I did it anyway. I think it was the cleaning that stopped them from going off, since no more alarms this week. The downstairs alarm was pretty dirty, with I don't know what, bug juice?

It is really dusty in my house, as long as I was cleaning alarms, I cleaned the furnace intake vent, since most surfaces are covered with dust after a day and the filter is fine. The vent was really dirty. Considering it is hardly windy and I have very little dirt around me, it sure is dusty in Idaho. I also noticed dryer sheets glued to the inside vent of the dryer. My friend told me not to use dryer sheets, because they can start a fire, but I thought she was being silly. Today I looked and there were two of them glued to the vent stopping any air from getting out. Guess that is something I now have to check until I finish using up the dryer sheets.

Since I get a refund, I did my taxes. I got Turbo Tax, just Federal, how hard can Idaho State income taxes be? Wish I got Turbo Tax with State, Idaho income taxes are a confusing mess. I am poor enough to get an Idaho food credit of $60, the maximum, woopie! It took me 20 minutes to figure out how to complete my return in order to get it.

The Chinese New Year of the Dragon begins February 4. This is a Male (Yang) Water (Black) Dragon year. To know how this year will be for you, you need to know your animal sign and your lucky element. I am a Black Tiger and my lucky element is Earth (making total sense that Idaho would be good for me.) The Dragon is solitary, lucky, and dramatic, so the Dragon predicts a dramatic year, good or bad. My horoscope this week also predicts dramatic change, like I have not had plenty already, but I would not mind dramatically good.

I have a commission and I'm losing my framer. The commission is from one of my regular (if you can call it that) clients. They are also a dream client that always supplies reference that will make a super painting. Yesterday I went to Target and noticed the framer I use is closing, going out of business. Turns out they are retiring and really happy, but will only be open for another short month. That means I need to finish my commission within the next week or two to be able to have them frame it.

I am also starting some inner work and wondering what to do with this blog. I seemed to have achieved much of what I was after, but the inner work is because I feel a bit "stuck."

So, because of the commission and the inner work, I decided to take a bit of a vacation from blogging until March 3rd. Maybe by then I will have more of an idea of what to do next. I will be almost 50 and it will be almost Spring.