Month: December 2024

Art as a progression

There are people – presumably with skills – that make a living from their drawings, paintings, and other artistic presentations. Some are serious, some comic, some downright absurd (especially what people will pay for them). I am not one of those people.

I have a day job I enjoy, along with assorted creative hobbies, from crocheting to writing, that I occasionally present in a way that could supplement my income. Drawing and painting, however, are activities that I do simply for fun, or to extricate a stuck idea from my head.

The butterfly below, for example, is another iteration of Andrea Nelson’s activities that present a focus image divided into smaller sections for coloring. In this particular case, drawn and painted on Christmas Eve, I decided that the butterfly should be painted in red and green. For contrast, I selected blue and purple as the background colors.

A red and green butterfly with assorted squiggly lines drawn through and around it.
A red and green butterfly with assorted squiggly lines drawn through and around it, with a blue and purple background.
A red and green butterfly with assorted squiggly lines drawn through and around it, with a blue and purple background. Each section between squiggly lines has been outlined in the color it was filled with.

The process itself was fun, just sitting and painting for a while on a relaxing day off. The naming process can be fun too… I call this image The Very Hungry Caterpillar Who Ate the Christmas Decorations.

For myself, art is not a progression of skill – though there is a bit of that happening. Rather, it’s been a progression of appreciation for the creative process, knowing that whatever the result looks like, I had fun making it.

A decorated tree!

Part of a holiday tree decorated with assorted ornaments, mostly crocheted. Also, there's a dinosaur attached to a stick on the tree, only because the stick is useful for opening and closing the curtain behind the tree.

We’re trying something new this year… putting ornaments on the tree! I don’t think we’ve had ornaments on a tree since we adopted Arwen back in 2017, since cats – especially kittens – and ornaments are a notoriously bad combination.

In 2020, Zuko moved in, postponing the possibility of ornaments longer. Even now, none of them are particularly breakable. We lucked out and rediscovered a bag filled with crocheted ornaments – candy canes, snowflakes, and tiny trees with wine corks – and have supplemented those with a couple 3D-printed decorations from a friend.

So far, only a couple of the cork-filled trees have gone wandering through the house. Next year, I may be tempted to dig out my animated character ornaments. They’re plastic, of course.

Adulting is weird

More specifically, the satisfaction from successfully adulting is weird. I suppose some parts seem more obvious than others, like finishing my holiday shopping early, and having holiday cards in the house already. (A few have made it to the mailbox.)

A new stove & oven, with five burner controls - the center one is griddle-shaped, with custom-sized griddle fitting neatly between the other four burns. The oven display includes an array of functions, including an air fryer setting.

But there’s the glee of having a new oven and stove, and it hits on several levels. The old oven had an intermittent heat sensor issue which occasionally made baking frustrating. It was the last major appliance in the kitchen from the previous owner, and we wanted to replace it before it forced us to (unlike the dishwasher and refrigerator). The new one is marketed as accessible; the major change from our previous one is that most of the pieces that can be removed are dishwasher safe. And, to my budget’s immense satisfaction, the range was purchased with a Costco gift card.

Now we’re hitting several celebratory firsts… each of those favorite dishes like the first pizza in the new oven, and the first pancakes on the built-in griddle. Yes, that center section of the stove is actually a griddle-shaped burner with a custom-sized griddle! See, that’s one of those weirdly satisfying bits from adulting, along with the warning beep a minute before the timer finishes.

That satisfaction comes from smaller things too, like the new-to-us set of craft drawers, or replacing the difficult to access garage light bulb. And it definitely comes from the new shower head that I installed in the master bathroom. Who knew there was so much water pressure? And the shower draws warm water faster… because there’s more water pressure!