Recent days

The latest sketchcrawl was a week ago, but it’s been a busy week, so I’m just getting around to posting it tonight.   Showers had come and gone all day.  It was hot and sticky out and the thing I really wanted to draw was a cool refuge. 

This sweet spot was on the street side of a big old oddly rural looking building in the town next to mine.  The lucky folks who own it and obviously cherish it with care live across the street from a parkway surrounding a river that snakes through green neighborhoods.   Wouldn’t you like to enjoy a quiet hour or two here?

 

An afternoon at the animal shelter with my niece provided a much less peaceful opportunity to draw.  Kittens don’t sit still for long and Cookie Dough the bunny paused just long enough to identify the next impossible-to-reach place he was going to hide in.

 

My lesson not yet learned.

 

 I cannot quite believe how I have spent the entire afternoon. It reminds me of the dreams one has with high school or college as the setting. You know, the ones. You’re in school and in a panic. You’re totally unprepared for a big test that you’ve just remembered is being given today. Maybe you’re unprepared because you didn’t study or you haven’t shown up for a single class all semester or maybe you’re in a panic because you just realized that you forgot to get dressed between showering at home and going to class and your memory lapse is now out there for all to see.

Well, okay. This afternoon hasn’t been quite that traumatizing, but it still seems strange that I have had an afternoon of desperately doing homework that I’ve neglected until the last minute. Homework? I couldn’t believe it when the instructor assigned it. Homework? That’s okay when your parents force you to go to school and do nothing themselves all day except go to work and have nothing to do in the evening but sit around and do things that parents like to do–things like make dinner and schlepp you to the mall or to your friend’s house. But homework for adults who are paying to have a good time one day a week? I was much more gracious than it sounds like I was when MA gave the first assignment. And the second assignment didn’t sound like it would be much of a problem. I mean I’m not getting graded on this, right? I could do the whole thing in like ten minutes, easy. It wouldn’t be the best picture ever drawn, but hey (and here I shrugged in my mind), I’m not trying to be teacher’s pet. Ten minutes and I’m outta there.

The third and fourth assignments were assigned in the afternoon class. I was sensible enough to start feeling panic by that time and that’s probably why I kept putting off starting the assignments the day after I got them. Yesterday as I started getting ready to go to Nephew’s birthday party I remembered what I should have been doing all week, but I couldn’t not show up for the party. I was driving the guest of honor and quite a lot of food to the bash and after the bash I felt like I’d been to a bash.

So that’s why I’ve been hard at it all afternoon. I figure that I’ll finish that last irritatingly impossible piece in time to leave tomorrow if I don’t sleep more than four hours tonight. I make no promises about being awake enough to remember to get dressed before I leave the house though.

 

Joy

Nephew graduated today from the high school he started in as a freshman four years ago and his younger sister and I cheered for him, though we couldn’t really see him, so far back from the stage and off to the side were our seats in the bleachers. 

Admittedly my part in this was minor compared to other graduate’s adults, but I was allowed a full measure of joy along with all the others.

My joy got a boost from the letter the young man received today from the university:  he will attend with all expenses including tuition, housing, books, and living expenses paid for him.  He will also have a university job for ten hours a week so that he can afford a social life and some foolish expenditures besides.  He will enter this larger world in late August.  After working–not really hard, admittedly–to redeem himself after the expulsion and various tickets that he’s gotten, the slate is clean and ready for him to mark it with greater care.

It’s an exciting time for him.  Be happy with me.