sunday, painting Dad

I've been meaning to do a painting of my Dad ever since I finished the one of Mom several months ago. As a couple they were inseparable, and I just know that somewhere out there in the vastness of an uncomprehending universe they are sitting around, drinking coffee, enjoying a nice piece of Entenmann's crumb cake or maybe a honey bun or two and wondering why their daughter hasn't yet made them a matched set. The truth is, I wasn't sure if I could catch a likeness. My father was a handsome, funny, charming man, and a Sunday painter like me. His portrait has to be just-so. So I keep putting it off.

But the rains and my own lack of ambition have kept me from painting outdoors for the last couple of weekends, outdoors being the only place I can deal with the smell and mess of the oils, and yesterday was still a little too cool. So I dragged the watercolors down from the guestroom closet and tried a tiny (4x4") sketch at the dining room table, based on a photo I took on a long-ago trip back home. The plan is to make a 12 X12" canvas to compliment Mom's in style and intent. I'm pretty awful with watercolor, always using too much water and mushing up the color, but I'm actually pretty pleased with this first attempt.

It's not perfect, and I need to adapt on the canvas in order to show his casually crossed arms and the WWII era tattoo that was such a part of who he was. But it looks like him. It feels like him. I may be able to come up with a matched set after all.

Oh, and the New Orleans Saints came marching in too ~ Laissez les bon temps roulez! Hip hip hooray!

A very happy Sunday overall.

optimism

According to all the experts and Jillian Michaels, an individual must take at least 10,000 steps a day in order to maintain a healthy body weight, a statistic I find breathtaking in its optimism. I know this to be a rather difficult thing to do. In fact, I have long suspected the cardio machines at my own gym of flat-out lying to me about the number of miles and calories I was logging per session; of padding the numbers in a blatant attempt to bolster my faltering ego, to assure me that yes, I was still cute and no, pink sweat pants with Juicy emblazoned across the bottom (in a suspiciously large font) do not make my butt look bigger. Only, you know, perkier. And possibly age-inappropriate. But good for me!

To my everlasting credit and intrinsic paranoia, I did not take these disingenuous exercise machines at their word. In a move not unlike that of hiring a private detective to check up on a dubious lover, about a week or so ago I went out and bought myself a pedometer. Because I simply had to know the truth.

So far, other than the discovery that sitting at a computer while wearing a pedometer and expecting the numbers to increase is the height of magical thinking, the results are inconclusive. But it hardly matters. I needn't have bothered. Because who needs to walk when you can just get one of these?

Enjoy. I laughed so hard my pedometer fell off. And I logged 673 more steps.