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This week's pictures include a watercolor of a remarkable young bird who befriended us at a local botanical garden. Either it was hand-raised by humans or learned how to beg at a young age. Either way, it is as tame as a parakeet. There's a picture of me and the bird, too. I also included some travel drawings, various pen and inks and an experiment with a new rubber stamp I carved.

On the home health front, the docs have determined, through ultrasound, that Kelly's 'tumor' is, in fact, a cyst ... and Aunt Vi is getting better by the day, albeit slowly. We give thanks for every small step toward regained health.

Kelly has a tumor in her foot. She's going to have surgery. It's probably benign.
OK. I got the hardest part out of the way. Now for the rest of the story.

When LaBelle Kel ran the marathon earlier this year, she didn't have any problems with a lump that had been in her foot for, what, eight years or more? She thought it was a cyst, a little annoying, but nothing to get worked up about.

A few weeks ago she went on a hike and her foot gave her considerable discomfort, so she went to her doctor for a look. His initial impression was that it was a cyst which could be aspirated or removed. But an MRI told a different story, and an oncologist confirmed it is a tumor. The docs feel that it is unlikely that it is malignant, but it needs to come out, pronto. After that, Kel will have about 6 weeks recuperation. I hope this won't prevent her marathon training for 05 if she chooses to run again.

She is keeping all of this in a good, optimistic perspective, and we are trying not to borrow trouble. After Aunt Vi's sudden and unexpected open heart surgery it is certainly giving us reason to appreciate the quiet, uneventful days.

Current Mood: busy

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First an update on Aunt Vi ... she is off the ventilator and eating normal food. She sat up in a chair for two hours the day after surgery! We brought her a vanilla shake last night which she sipped with great pleasure. Today she seemed a little agitated, but that is a normal part of the healing experience after anything as traumatic as having your chest opened and your heart stopped for hours.

Artwise, I put 8 new pictures on the site. Although I drew and journaled constantly in the hospital, most of the images are from field sketches and paintings in my watercolor journal, done up in the Angeles Crest forest last weekend. There's also the final stage of the letterboxing adventure ... and some new things I'm trying with pen and ink and watercolor.

The picture above was painted on location in Descanso Gardens while I was visiting with an art friend of mine. She did a lovely drawing of people strolling through an arbor while I puttered around with light and flowers. There are a lot of things I don't like about this painting, but I'm not going to bore you with counting the ways. My objective was to paint the low afternoon backlight coming from behind the cottage, so I learned a few do's and don'ts there.

Current Mood: busy

It was a longer surgery than anticipated, due to the delicacy of her tissues, but she made it through and she's now in the ICU, sleeping very very soundly. She may not wake up until later tonight, or tomorrow, and then they'll be better able to assess her condition and see how well she responds to commands.
Vi's attitude was positive all the way, and the hospital team has been fantastic about keeping us informed and explaining everything. Thanks to everyone who sent their wishes, through LJ and otherwise. It really helps keep us going and I know the feeling gets through to her, too. Now we just hope that recovery will go as smoothly. She has a lot of painful days and work ahead of her, but she has a strong desire to live another 10 years and I know she'll give it her all.

Current Mood: optimistic and thankful

Aunt Vi is having her open heart surgery this morning at 8 AM West Coast time. Hold a good thought for her, please. She's 89 and a real fighter with a great attitude, but there are always risks during and after. We're off to the hospital in about 25 minutes ... will update later.

Current Mood: optimistic and thankful

I love my new glasses. No, wait, I hate them. But I can't live without them. I despise them.
The backstory.
I have been myopic as long as I can remember, and I can remember back to when I was very young and got my first pair. I don't remember the visit to the optometrist but I remember standing in our kitchen, looking at the soft fuzzy blue and white curtains and the warm fuzzy light streaming in through the window. Then, suddenly, I put the glasses on and everything snapped into sharp focus. So THIS is how the world looks! I was intoxicated with the look of distant trees, the birds on the wire, seeing my parents' faces.

In the intervening nearly 50 years, my fascination with the world hasn't changed but my eyewear has. I can trace my history through a sucession of rhinestone encrusted cat eye glasses, contacts, Gloria Steinem style aviator glasses, tortoise, metal, barely visible rims ... you name it, I've worn it. In the last ten years, however, I've found myself having to take off my glasses to read a map, which is the myope's equivalent of holding your arm farther and farther away to get the fine print in focus. We near-sighted people suffer from presbyopia, too, we just have our own twist on it.

When my five year old frames broke last year, I knew the time had come to try something different. After a disastrous experience at Lenscrafters in which I tried monovision (one contact near, one contact far) and blended glasses (with a prescription so strong it practically gave me migraines and nausea,) and experienced the belligerent optometrist from hell, I finally switched to a local doctor who has patiently worked with me to find a solution.

Here's the problem. I like to draw and paint, of course - and I do other close artistic work, like making faux postage and soft-block carving. I can take off my glasses to do these activities - no problem - but then I can't see the thing I'm drawing. I can barely see the computer screen with my glasses off. Seriously. It's that bad. Until now I have been compromising by using my distance glasses so that I can see my subject (a person, a bulldog, a ballerina clown on top of a building) and settling for a somewhat fuzzy image in my sketchbook.) I have been drawing with one eye tied behind my back - not a pretty image.

That era has come to an end. I am not thrilled about the idea of bifocals, and i hate the line between the two prescriptions - I am easily distracted with small annoyances - but i have to say it beats the alternative of not seeing my subject or not seeing my paper clearly. So there you are.

Bifocals are one of those milestones that no one ever thinks they'll need, but eventually everyone seems to. Lasik surgery may be another alternative, but my experience with the medical system has been so checkered I'm afraid I'd be the one in a thousand that had a bad outcome and I just can't take that chance. Until they perfect surgery and can guarantee results for myope-presbyope-astigmatic folk like me, I'll be using this low-tech solution and enjoying the fact that I can see a lot more like I used to. I used these new glasses on location for the first time on Sunday, painting in the forest, and I found that the "line" disappeared as I became absorbed in my subject. When I stood up to walk to another place that was a different story. The ground was extremely blurry and I almost lost my footing walking over some river stones. It's always something.

Current Mood: okay with it

Needing a bit of a respite, my dh and I went up to our nearby forest, to a little day camp called Switzer's. We've been going to Switzer's since we moved to this area nearly 24 years ago. It's little more than a creek fed by local springs, surrounded by oaks, pines and sycamores. If you take a hike to the end of the trail, there's a waterfall. We did not go that far because our plan was to have a little lunch then to find several different stream-side locations where I could do some nature studies in ink and watercolor, and where my dear one could do some video macrophotography. As it turned out we had a very successful day. I did several paintings: one of some gnarled and twisted exposed tree roots, another of a mallow-like plant and some tiny vignettes of pine cones and leaves. I will likely upload a few of these later in the week when I update Random Acts of Inkness. As I was leaving one location, I suddenly felt a sharp STING in my arm that hurt more than most needles. I yelped in suprise, attracting my husband's attention. (He later told me it's not often he hears me yelp out loud - I must have been exceptionally noisy.) It became apparent I'd been stung by something, and I started flailing my arms wildly and running around. STING! It got me a second time. (Or it was a second bug, the first time.) I told my husband to get out of there, that something was attacking. He got up to leave and I started walking back to the car. STING! It got me a third time and I picked up my pace, yelling to him to leave. I don't know if they would find him appetizing as well, or if I had that je ne sais qua so appealing to insectoids. We left the area in a hurry and our stingers did not follow. A ways down the road we saw some yellowjackets hovering near a stream, so we're assuming that's what we ran into. So, ever-curious geekess that I am, when I got home I did a little reading up on yellowjackets. I learned that, being wasps, they have large nests which they guard ferociously. If you are bitten the best thing to do is to stay calm and quietly leave the area. If you run they will continue to pursue you and bite you - the invader. if you flail and swat it stimulates the yellowjacket to exude some sort of scent which calls his friends. I guess it's sort of the "Danger, Will Robinson" signal of bug society. So I apparently did everything wrong, but still lived to tell the tale. I will wear long sleeves the next time, however. I did not hang around long enough to paint this yellowjacket from a live model, so I found a resource for one when I got home and did this painting in my journal to commemorate the event. I'm still hurting. I hope he's not swaggering around the mud hive telling manly stories and getting high sixes from his buddies. And I hope he's got a really sore butt.

Current Mood: annoyed

We got a smoker not too long ago, and I've been enjoying learning new ways to prepare pork shoulder, or chicken pieces, salmon and beef ribs, to name but a few. My husband is a big fan of my cooking, and I'm glad for that. It seems Ripley is a big fan, too. Or so I'm guessing. There was the remains of a pork shoulder on the butcher block on the kitchen island ... and then later, there wasn't. When I rounded up the usual suspects, Mandu the cat explained how she was too old to get up on the table. Our son hadn't left his room and the 15 IM windows open on his PC attested to that fact. My husband was with me. Foggy, the upstairs cat only leaves her den after dark. That narrowed it down to Ripley. Busted.

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We have been up and down the rollercoaster over my aunt's medical condition. The bad news is she does, in fact, have a severely calcified and critically narrowed aortic heart valve. The good news is that our hospital of choice, a top 100 US heart hospital, has accepted her for surgery which will be done late next week. There is always a risk involved with surgery, especially for someone who's 89, but without it her future is very bleak. We have confidence in the work of this center and we are optimistic about the outcome.

Between appointments and tests, I've been drawing to reduce stress. This week in my journal I drew a few pages while La Belle Kel and I went letterboxing in Pasadena ... there's a photo about a family of finches which has flocked to my fern (say that fast three times) and I've drawn a "grid" based on a composite of medical experiences ... a statement about dizzying complexities and attempts to navigate an arcane and confusing system. And there are other drawings, too.

Yesterday I got three Rotring Rapidoliner pens in the mail from an auction I had won on eBay. I was very excited about this because I had heard so many glowing things about them, especially from Danny Gregory and some other friends on the Everyday Matters yahoogroup. I haven't taken the pens out of their wrappers, yet, but I will soon, probably today.

I'm a proponent of advanced technology in whatever form it takes - high tech nibs, flat screen monitors or digital toothpicks. You get the picture. But there's something about old technology that enchants me.

So I got to thinking about quill pens, and how I have always wanted to try one. It's not something you get at Office Max, however, so I had to come at it another way. I had some turkey feathers in a box in the attic, purchased for a long ago and now forgotten Y Indian Guides project, so I decided to try cutting a pen from one. To my great surprise, the cutting was relatively simple (I did it with an exacto knife) and to my even greater surprise, it performed pretty well. (My drawing skill notwithstanding.)

So here's the first picture done with it ... it's my primitive Speedball gouge with #1 veiner tip, which just happened to be lying around the drafting table when the quill was done. What I like about this pen is the variation in line quality that can be achieved by twisting it this way and that, almost like a chisel point felt tip. But the amount of ink you retain after dipping also adds to the unpredictability of line as it runs out. And when the quill is almost dry the lines become soft and faint ... all the better for shading.

Of course, a quill pen isn't something I can easily throw in my bag for journaling in a cafe (unless I want to drag along a bottle of ink and put up with more than the usual number of strange looks) but for drawing in studio it should do nicely.

Now, if only a crow will drop a nice sturdy feather from that elm in the yard where they've been perching ...