Hey, I'm still here!

Hi!  Happy St. Patrick's Day!  I hope everyone is wearing o'the green today, and not drinking o'the green (beer), or...turning o'the green from drinking too much.  Perhaps later on today we will be mowing o'the green (lawn).

Scotty helps us mow the lawn.  He does!  He eats the grass that comes up.

I feel bad for not writing in here more often, but I do have a couple good reasons for it.  There are some projects taking up tons of time right now, some of which I am at liberty to talk about now, and some of which I'm not....plus the usual ongoing process of making the house look nicer and function better, maintenance of dogs, and making sure my family is eating properly (and one of them is a 16-year-old boy, so that is a hard job, my friends).

One of the projects has been designing a website for a business one of my friends started.  Over the past few years I've mostly been maintaining already-built websites (including my own), so starting one from scratch has been a whole different ball game.  I've had to learn some new tricks for this one, which is great...now I want to bring some of my new tricks to redesigning my own website.

Also, I got to go on a pretty sweet business trip to Las Vegas to meet with the company I was doing the site for.  That was awesome.

Dale Chihuly at the Cosmopolitan?  You don't realize this until you get there, but there's actually TONS of art in Vegas, and realizing that the place clearly employed soooo many designers was kinda cool.

However, creating a website is pretty left-brained, at least once you get past the initial design phase and get into the coding and actually piecing things together.  It's exercising different muscles, for sure.  And I love doing it, but it's making me miss painting and other right-brained things!  Gah, I need to carve out some more time to just PAINT, now that the first phase of that project is over with.

I'm also in the process of deciding which art festivals will be worth the investment this spring...and I have to decide pretty fast.  There's one coming up that sounds PERFECT but the entry fee is expensive...ah, the eternal dilemma of a craft fair artist.

But when I'm not glued to my computer screen, I'm just enjoying the spring weather we've been having, and seeing the flowers that come up in our new yard.  That's one of the cool things about a new house: seeing how the seasons differ there.  Apparently we have lots of flowering plants, which we didn't know when we bought the house in November!

 

Like a real, no-kidding rose...

 

Some lantana...

And...I'm not sure what this is, but it's a pretty color.

And JASMINE!  This is right outside the front door and every time I go outside it smells sooooo good.  Plus the citrus trees will be blooming soon, which will also smell awesome.

So that's been my spring so far.  I truly will try to be back on here more often (and PAINT more often!), and I'll let everyone know about the new stuff coming up as soon as I can!