Happy Spring, so happy to be here!

     Finally.........the towering mountain of work is behind me ( for now )  and I'm allowed the luxury of dipping a toe into the pool of thoughts unrelated to the project at hand or the painting currently on the drawing board, so posting on this sadly neglected ( since December 12! ) blog or updating my even more ignored website  or....reading books, working in my little garden, spending time with real human beings, painting my toenails scarlet or doing something spontaneous all become options.
    The slightly spooky thing is that part of me actually likes the schedule I've been accustomed to for the past 6 months, year. couple of years, ummm, a lot.....what does that mean? Nothing probably...other than that I love painting, am a bit of a recluse...probably from being an only child and working mostly all the time makes life very simple...

     Since the last time I was here, I moved.....just about 4 miles from where I was living before. I've been having fun taking some pictures while taking Baci the Fluffy Corgi on his morning walk.
I noticed several small silver metal disks, maybe 2.5 " in diameter....affixed, kind of bolted, to the paved road, before it turns to dirt.....I'd never seen anything like these before and took a photo of one. It seems as though I've truly been in a world of my own....along with some inevitable nearsightedness from a lifetime of drawing and painting small details......I  thought I was seeing something curious and remarkable ( to myself )  and ironically amusing. This is what I was seeing:

"Why" I wondered to myself "why would there be a silver disk in the road reading "Perfect Control"?
 Needless to say, I seriously doubt the very existence of "perfect control" in our happy, messily ordered Universe and so passing it made me giggle ( obviously, so much work made me exceedingly easily amused! ) but then also wondered about who would place, bolt these disks into the road and why would they read that? It was entertaining pondering this every morning and the whole idea of control, perfect or imperfect. Well....when I download the photos from my camera, I could easily see that actually this is what I was seeing, while believing I saw the disk above:

So, much less interesting and much less romantic and a lot more mundane....this little disk reads "Perteet Control" It seems Perteet is some sort of engineering concern that has to do with water  and roads and that sort of infrastructure and nothing that would normally cause one to ponder Universal Truths.....or X File types of imaginings. In the spirit of complete transparency, I admit to altering the Perfect Control disk in PhotoShop so you could see how easily one could make this fanciful error!
 Here are a few more photos of burgeoning Spring on this sweet road:

This is Lucky. He was given as a gift to the man who "owns" him for his 50th birthday by the man's wife. He is sort of the mascot of the road.......we stop and give him some carrots or an apple every morning and now Lucky comes running to meet us at the fence , licking his "lips". I never had a steer joyfully run across a field to meet me before.....

I especially love this gate.
Finally......here is some of what i have been working on:

 This 28" Uber Cupcake will become a shaped jigsaw puzzle
.........and here, below, are all 12 of the finished Animal ABC illustrations. The client will add the letters to the artwork and there will be a half inch border around each one with all the words depicted in each image, that start with the letter /letters in the square. I put them all together here like this, for fun:

So there you have it.........a bit of what I've been doing.
I also finished two picturebooks and am finally getting to painting the art for a third that's been patiently,,VERY patiently, waiting to be finished.
.......Happy Spring