Every once in a while my daughter pulls herself away from her busy life and sends me an instant message. The message usually goes something like this: “You need to update your blog.”  It’s always so nice to have a conversation with my daughter.

OK, that was laced with a bit of my sarcastic humor. She doesn’t always say that and we have many lovely conversations along the way. But it is true that my last online conversation with her started out just like that. She’s always had a demanding streak in her. You should have seen her when she was a year old and demanding that her father hold her up high enough so that she could touch the moon. Things were really getting ugly that evening.  I’ll stop this now before I dig a deeper hole to fall into.

I haven’t spent a lot of time on the computer lately. I’ve been busy helping The Boy with his new home. The place was a pig sty and we have been cleaning and repairing all week. He decided to remove the popcorn ceiling in the main room and that was a lot of work.. for him since I refuse to do that much work over my head… and a lot of clean up. Today we finished up the latest round of cleaning and tomorrow we will start painting. After that, I should have a bit more time to spend on my own activities.

I did take some time off today and went to play at Billie’s house with she and Arlynne. The plan was that we were going to try out a few texture techniques with gel mediums and paint.

This piece started out as a texture experiment. You can’t see the texture really well in the photo but the blue part on the bottom is loaded with it. It’s a bumpy mess if I do say so myself. It didn’t  take long for me to loose interest in the whole texture thing and I just started doodling with the paints. I must have had trees on my mind because my texture piece soon became a picture of trees reflecting in water. Aw c’mon, if you tilt your head just right and have it in the light just so it does look like trees. I swear it. They are just unique trees, so there. My second piece was the one at the top of this post. It started out with a streaked background that reminded me of a sunset. Then I decided to add some sand dunes and they were a big bust. I thought I could fix them by turning them into green hills. Then I started thinking about wadding it up and throwing it away. It was getting worse by the minute. Then I squirted out some more paint and kept going. Pretty soon it was looking like trees.. and you didn’t even have to tilt your head just right to see them. And then it was back to the clean up chores at The Boy’s house.