Squirrel Antics

Today's wildlife show was all about the squirrels. No birds, just squirrels. Evidently the birds are on an every-other-day schedule. Or something. Anyway, this squirrel had just dropped from the cob corn with a kernel in its paws. Naturally I wasn't fast enough to catch it hanging from the cob holder all stretched out with its white belly showing so you get this squirrel-looking squirrel.

This squirrel wasn't having a good day. It was trying to shinny up the crook that holds the suet pellets but the Slinky has been pushed down the crook so there's a couple feet of un-Slinky-ed pole left to climb and it's evidently slick because the squirrel would slide back every time it tried to go forward. This is its "I give up" fall to the ground.

I ate the last of the Red Lentil Soup with carrots and red bell pepper today and was too lazy and too cold to go to the grocery for lunch food so I whipped up another batch of North African Red Lentil Soup with tomatoes and onions. Yum. I made it today so that it has overnight for the flavors to meld. This gives me another four or five days until I have to venture out for lunchmeat and chopped salad for the wraps I like when I don't have soup. Maybe I'll make more soup when this lentil soup is gone...

I played with paint again today. I'm to the point in the class when she's talking about filling in the blank pages in our watercolor sketchbooks and I have a lot of pages to fill. So I painted two sheets of paper to use to cut out shapes for pasting into the pages and I cut out my practice fish so that I could use those to link techniques and themes. (I'm learning. It's only taken me three times watching the "Connecting Ideas" and "End Pages" videos to get with the program.)

This is my first attempt to get things together. The blocks of green paint are practice diluting paint to make lighter colors and on the right page are the tests to see if the colors I mixed were right for the pictures I had selected later in the sketchbook. The pages before and after this one have painted circles and the ones after this page are the contrasting colors wet-in-wet like the fish. (See? Links!)

 

And I got to draw a fish in the 3-D book today. Woohoo! This is a crazy fanged fish, not a happy friendly fish like the ones I've painted but still a fish. (Are you sensing a theme today?)

 

Today's toss was more old travel guides. It takes a while to get these books in the box because I have to page through them and find the places we visited and the sites we dived.

--Barbara