Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

I am glad I decided to work on drawing recently. I saw a set of prompts for January, and decided to try it, with the primary goals of the exercise being to familiarize myself with my digital drawing software (Sketchbook) and to get better at drawing cats. So far I've done, oh, a grand total of seven (I fell behind fairly quickly when what I was trying to draw surpassed my ability to get something completed in an hour or so), and so now I'm just drawing the ones I get ideas for, as quickly/slowly as the material demands. It's really nice to have an activity that's really portable and easy to do for a fairly short while (or that I can get completely engrossed in at least for a bit). And it's nice to have a project that I can do that is NOT thinking about the ridiculousness and horror of our world today. It's definitely a form of self-care!

I haven't been posting the pictures here, but you can see my drawings on Tumblr and on Mastodon. They're fun, and I hope you enjoy them! (The current one is a bit of a beast and is going to take a while, please be patient.)

We're back from our vacation!

My parents are doing pretty well, it was good to see them.  We went to the special Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts together in the middle of the week.  Special exhibitions at the MFA are usually good; this one was no exception.  :)  What was exceptional, I thought, was that each and every painting had a blurb next to it talking about one or more aspects of the painting: style, content, sweep.  Given that it was an exhibit looking at three rival painters, it sensibly grouped the paintings mostly by subject matter, so that the viewer could see what each man had done with, e.g. Saint Catherine in conversation with Mary and the infant Jesus, St. George and the dragon, portraits, etc.  Fascinating exhibit, and worthy of visit by anyone interested in comparative art study, Titian et al, and/or pretty paintings of people.  Even Dad seemed to enjoy himself.

Friday we took the train down to New Haven for the huz's 15-year reunion, and had a good time.  There were a number of people we knew from his class, and a couple of people outside his class (a friend doing the 20-year reunion who we knew from Storyreading, and - somewhat astonishingly - a lady who worked in the cafeteria of Huz's residential college when we were undergrads and who I would swear hasn't changed at all in the intervening years who was on the catering crew.  We were pleasantly surprised by the food at this reunion - much better offerings than the dining-hall quality food that we had at the ten-year.  We don't know whether this was due to Yale food generally improving, Yale recognizing that 15 years out of college everyone has good jobs and is used to real food, or that as the number of years out of college increases the cost of reunion does too and some of the cost goes to better food, or some combination of the three.  (We will be interested in hearing from the folks going next weekend what the food quality's like for them.)

Now that we're home, we're discovering that the cats really shed a ton while we were gone.  There has been much hair removal, sweeping, and vaccuuming.  It's getting to the point in the year when the cats shed out their winter coats and I need to vaccuum twice a week to keep the hair density under control.  Woo.  We need to do laundry as well.  In a while we'll go skating for the first time in well over a week, and I will have a voice lesson after having pretty much not practiced in close to two weeks.

Huz finished Phantom Hourglass at my parents and has started Final Fantasy A2.  My current point of pride is that I have gotten to the warp point after level 6 in the Phantom Dungeon with only 29 seconds gone from my hourglass.  (That, of course, is using every shortcut and every golden pot I can get my greasy little hands on.)  Huz is now whacking Ganondorf in Twilight Princess, a reasonable thing to do on the last day of vacation.