Today

Listening to Lou Reed (Walk on the Wild Side), OneRepublic (Good Life), Patty Smyth (The Warrior, Goodbye to You), Portugal The Man (Feel it Still), Sam Fender (The Borders), Tracy Chapman (Fast Car).

Complicated (sorta) morning followed by a hopefully leaner more streamlined afternoon 😊

Rechecked my latest reblog from SilverSneakers, this one re weight loss!

Making cereal breakfast early, so Sheila can grocery shop at Sprouts, so I can leave & head to the print so I can take some needed restock prints to the Old Bakery. Hope to have a post on the restock tomorrow. All goes well this will be my 1st time to go to the Old Bakery two weeks running since, hmmm, late August? And before that, early May?

Well, moving & surgeries’ll do that for ya, lol! 😊

If I’m lucky, I’ll still get my steps in today.

And if I’m really lucky – do all that and paint today ❤️

Yesterday

Yesterday two main avenues played themselves out throughout the full day.

One was my daily walking, and the other was my increasingly daily painting.

Both are resurgences beginning to resurface and re-establish themselves as dominant concerns in my every day life. Which I’m glad of, though there are challenges. How could it be otherwise, right? 😊

I’d mentioned in yesterday’s My Day Ahead I’d cracked 9000+ steps. Well, I actually ended up topping 10,000. Hadn’t done that in a very long time, and I felt it almost the whole day yesterday, with an unusual (for me) pain in my upper IT band in my right leg. I’d last had problems with my IT band around 2010 and learned to use a roller w/specific exercises to un-kink & strengthen it. But my recent consecutive-ness of walking back to my pre-2 surgeries level (which ended about late May), must have re-aggravated it. So yesterday (Tuesday), I scaled back (hobbled back? 😂) to a very respectable 7500+ . My reblog post for today, via SilverSneakers, though targeted to info re weight loss, has, as I mention in my intro to it, with applications beyond for seniors, and, weight loss, specifically, has this – my fav from the article – it’s ok to cheat 😊 ie, moderation vs strict adherence!

So if Monday I overdid via walking, yesterday, I overdid via painting ❤️

I’ve been working my way back to painting more regularly, or at all, since I hadn’t painted at all since mid-May, when we began our move, then, by late May, began getting the multi-hour gastro pain attacks leading to my trip to the ER.

Then, yesterday, with the forecast strongly suggesting sunshine’ll be scarce in the coming few days, I went past my daily short stint at the easel with a second short sitting (I rarely stand like I used to up to about a decade ago), then, after lunch, for a time-was-forgotten multi-hour session til dusk. I also knew that today (Wed) I’d be busy going to the printer, restocking at the Old Bakery, plus the drive times. I guess I cheated, so to speak, in reverse, splurging cause I knew I’d have to do without for most if not the day today. I think that made sense, lol!

In the same way I become more and more aware of my body as I continue rebuilding my walking routine, not to mention exactly how the weather – the sky, the air, sounds – is doing, I also am becoming more and more aware of how my painting process is doing.

For a few days, in my short session days, I was enjoying rediscovering highlighting little curling ridges of paint, adding a shadow line above or below another ridge line of paint – something I’d read Monet often did after a point in his career. I’d often wondered why he’d felt he’d needed to do that. After all, when light hit the textured paint, the light would create the highlights. I’d also wondered why some of my paintings seemed flatter at times, sometimes permanently, after I’d finished them. That was one of the things I‘ve thought about during my recent painting renaissance. Renaissance of spirit if nothing else, lol!

I’ve mentioned how I’m repeating (in a Hegelian spiral shift sort of way) something I worked to great success with my painting, Austin at Night, which was to take make prints of photos I’d take while in-progress. It gave me a perspective of where I was at and what I wanted – in real time, not when I 1st started the painting. Only now, until I decide about getting a projector to easily view my captured stages of my work-in-progress, I’m using my iPhone’s screen (had to reset it’s go-dark time so’s not to have to constantly re-tap the screen to keep it active).

Having a screenshot of my original, taken with indirect side light, lets the highlights on the paint ridges literally shine! I then compared it my original (12×16 canvas), and started recreating my “finished” work 😊

I also tinkered with my tonal settings (black point esp), and my warmth/cool setting, tinkered until I saw something I wished I’d painted, and set out to see if I can come close, or, find something else along the way I like as much ❤️

One of the latter is, though I’d originally really liked my muted almost grayish infused version of In the Light, I really much prefer warmer tones 💕

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My Latest Blog Posts

• May 15, 2021 – Random (sorta) Pic of the Day, Bird Friends at Our BalconyMay 15, 2021
  Granted, my real life observation of birds is relatively limited, I’ve never seen this before, one Cardinal feeding two! Wonderful really, so amazed at the joy of such a tiny slice of nature ❤️ To say it’s adorable seems nearly a cliche, but adorable it is!
• May 14, 2021 – Random (sorta) Pic of the Day, First Bird to Visit Our New Balcony Brings a FriendMay 14, 2021
  Adding on to yesterday’s pic of our 1st bird visitor to our new balcony at our new location is, I assume 😊, the same little bird, but with a friend, her red feathered boy cardinal I think! The expressions, I think, are priceless!
• May 13, 2021 – Random (sorta) Pic of the Day, First Bird to Visit Our Balcony in Our New LocationMay 13, 2021
  A simple pic tonight, a simple mingling of sentiments – innocence, curiosity, hunger….
• May 13, 2021 – Our #1 Learned Lesson This Move : Number the Boxes and Make a Digital List!May 13, 2021
  “Such a simple idea, and Sheila says she’s either read or heard something similar, but only occurred to me this morning searching for random items I must’ve stuffed into a box with other stuff and now can’t find them – number each box, make a list of….”
• May 12, 2021 – Random (sorta) Pic of the Day, A Little Water in Barton CreekMay 12, 2021
  “…here goes a short quickshot pictorial of my 1st probe of the nearest Austin nature area new to us, one we’ve never explored before; all done yesterday evening at the last moment.”
• May 12, 2021 – Random (sorta) Pic of the Day, Map for Barton Creek Greenbelt Near Us via Google MapsMay 12, 2021
  “…here goes a short quickshot pictorial of my 1st probe of the nearest Austin nature area new to us, one we’ve never explored before; all done yesterday evening at the last moment.”
• May 11, 2021 – Random (sorta) Pic of the Day, Absorbing NatureMay 11, 2021
  “…here goes a short quickshot pictorial of my 1st probe of the nearest Austin nature area new to us, one we’ve never explored before; all done yesterday evening at the last moment.”

Thanks so much everyone! 😊

Adan

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