Happiness is....

While searching for some art magazines from years ago, I found a photo of myself taken when I was about 13, late 1960's - the official confirmation photo I believe. I remember my mother taking me to have the photo done at probably one of the few professional photographers in town.

I remember having myhair set the night before and having to sleep with rollers in which I thought the worst indignity. Then the dress. I still remember the stiff organdy material and the even scratchier petticoat underneath. It was a one off dress for a one off occasion and that's about all I do remember of it. A rite of passage for the Anglican church.

For fun I drew the image of that photo. Done in a Canson sketchbook 8.5 x 5.5, mechanical pencil of assorted leads, ranging from hb to 2b.

I look at myself in it and see part of the past, part of the future. Thirty-nine years have passed since that moment was captured. So much has happened in thirty-nine years. And I had barely an inkling at 13 of how any of it would turn out.

I spent the afternoon wandering through garden centres looking for scented leaf geraniums and variegated leaf geraniums. I found both and will put them in pots. I wish I'd taken my camera and my sketchbook with me as I wandered. The colours and people and greenhouses would have made great compositions and sketching sites. Next time.

How do you make ducks and geese happy for $9.93? You buy them a paddling pool.

There is a pond on the property but it faces onto the road and I am wary of having the birds there as people do have a tendancy to think the world is theirs for the taking and I don't want them to end up on someone's dinner table or worse. So its the paddling pool for them. Yesterday the Pekins dived into a wheelbarrow liner filled with water and expected the same today. So off to the store to find one - or two or three. The sales guy kept giving me odd looks as I bought three paddling pools. He must have thought I had a lot of kids!

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