Chore Day, Nov 16, 2019 -- Under the Weather

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My usual chore day is all about cooking up batches of food for the coming week, but today I took it easy. I’m still recuperating and I’m feeling low. After baking up some goodies for my canine boys, I managed to brew a pot of veggie broth and bake some bean burgers, then I crashed. I napped, then woke up thinking of all the chores I didn’t do. Ah! Sometimes a good plan falls through.

I grabbed a cup of coffee and sketched the view from my seat at the kitchen table. Drawing always takes my mind on aches and pains. Tomorrow I’m going to go out of the house for the first time in 10 days. I’m going take my usual Sunday morning walk down to Case (that’s a coffee shop) and have a Golden Milk turmeric latte with a shot of espresso.

Rather than using Photoshop to resize the scan, I used Gimp on OS X. Works great, and it loads faster than Photoshop 2020. And, it’s free. 100% free with no annoying subscription. This is great for me because I hate having everything on the Cloud. I want all of my pictures on my computers, not on computers belonging to a Great Big Enterprise.

Black Grapes

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The only thing artistic about my day is this pen and ink drawing of a cluster of black grapes in a steel-mesh strainer. I made the sketch this morning before I went off to work. I got home late. I can’t say I moved forward an inch today on my children’s picture book, but I won’t beat myself up. I enjoyed sketching the grapes. I used an anonymous brush pen, Japanese, with no English name.

Alas, poor grapes — they served me well as the most patient of models. When I went to visit them just now, there were gone, but this was scarcely odd, because I’d eaten every one. I give a tip of my hat to Lewis Carroll.