Whoa, passage of time...

Hi guys.  Well, I'm still pregnant (over halfway through now!), it's still hot as Satan's you-know-what here, so I'm taking lots of naps and I'm not being very productive.  But, on the upside, monsoons will be starting soon...

It's just teasing us now.

Oh, and this weekend, I actually picked up some paints for the first time in way too long! (the progress picture goes under the cut, because, well, it's in progress and as such it's kind of unsightly...)

Summery things...

Okay, first, allow me a brief pregnant-lady rant: so, non-alcoholic beer?  It's not good.  One of my husband's friends had a beer-tasting party last weekend, and I went anyway, and brought some different near-beers so I could taste-test those, and...yeah, they were crap.  I love a good beer, especially in the summer, and these just tasted like weird, bitter, vegetable-soup-flavored sodas.

But then, that was just O'Doul's, St. Pauli NA, and Kaliber (the one that's made by Guinness...still not good, not vegetable-y, but sort of cinnamon-coffee-ish in a bad way).  What's a good non-alcoholic beer that tastes somewhat real, internets?!  I need help.

Other than that, we've been having some nice days, so I've been using my back porch "office" some more...

Scotty is still an awesome back porch coworker.

The warm weather, plus the constant marketing of summer stuff that's already begun (swimsuits, pool toys, beach stuff in Target even though we live about eight hours from any beach) inspired me to do a piece of summer art yesterday:

Trying to re-green my thumb...

You know what's the best thing about March/April?  Well, besides palo verde trees being in bloom.  And all the other flowers.  And besides slightly warmer weather but not too hot yet.  And besides Cadbury eggs.  Okay, so...it's one on a very long list of good things about this time of year.

You get to PLANT STUFF!

I got some mini pots of herbs at Lowe's a couple weeks ago while picking up some other things for around the house...about $3 each, but they've already grown a lot, so I predict I'll get a great return on that investment.

More pics and some other plants...

Inspired Monday: go outside!

Guess where I'm writing this from today?

It's our patio!  We're fortunate in this house to have a big shaded patio area - our old house had almost no shade in the yard, so during a lot of the year it was just too hot to be out there for very long.  But this patio is perfect for taking my work outdoors, especially this time of year!  We have this futon on the patio, so Scotty and I can sit out here, I can work on my design assignments, and he can come up here to take breaks from running around on the lawn with a toy sheep.

Plus, you can't beat these views...

Monday = cheap Cadbury egg day!

Happy Easter weekend, guys!  Here's a quick Easter piece I did, a bit of an experiment...

In two different colorways, just for fun...egg shapes were made in Illustrator, with a collage of different watercolor textures layered on in Photoshop.  Left side is Screen blending mode, right side I believe is Hard Light (looks kinda Eric Carle-ish to me).  These will also be up this afternoon on Society6 and my print store, in case anyone wants some last-minute Easter-y goodness...hint, hint...

We're not doing anything in particular for Easter...I just wanted to draw eggs.  But I'm realizing that in a couple years, though, we could be getting into the baskets-and-egg-hunts phase of childhood...which is great!  I'm kinda looking forward to doing all the holiday trappings that you do with a kid.  And I'm pretty good at hiding eggs, so I hope our kid is a good finder. ;)

Big news, baby...

Okay, I think that it is now safe to talk about the other, er, "project" I've had in the works for a couple months now...the news is out, so I might as well release it on this blog too.

So.  Guess what this is.

This, my friends, is my, well...new creation!  Due to arrive in October.  Yep.  I'm pregnant.  (It's for real!  I had to post this today and not yesterday because the timing would have been...bad.)

More boring stuff about that under the cut...

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).