Sorry I've been gone so long, and sorry for (again) deleting my LJ. But, I've restored it again, and I intend to update it--firstly with a long and rambling entry about what I did this Spring, Summer and Autumn, or more accurately, what I didn't do!

     Earlier this year, around April, I finished up the last of the paintings for my 2010 Calendar, and I fully intended to get right to work on lots more paintings. And then it hit me--a terrible, terrible case of burnout. For day after day, I would dutifully sit in front of my computer, and produce-- absolutely nothing. I would start new pieces, and wind up deleting them, or paint on half-done pieces and then wind up deleting what I'd done. Eventually, I realized that this was serious, and needed some serious action (or inaction). So I took the rest of the Spring off from art, and then the Summer as well, and now most of Autumn. I've been back working for a couple of weeks now, and I'm taking it very, very, veeeery slowly, since I don't want to scare away my (apparently FRAGILE and easily distracted!!) muse.

     What I did accomplish while I wasn't painting was to lose weight. I've lost 29-ish pounds so far, with 14 more to go to reach my goal. I quit the diet for a couple of weeks since I just got tired of the tiny meals, but now I'm fired up again to lose the rest of the weight so I can buy new clothes, since my old clothes just hang on me. My jeans are so baggy my husband says they look like jodhpurs. And the sad thing is, that just a couple of years ago, I threw away my old jeans from when I was thinner because I thought I would 'never be that size again'. My husband is also on the diet and has lost over 50 pounds! It's pure diet the way we do it, no exercise whatsoever, and although we started out following the South Beach diet, we have since discovered, that for us anyway, it doesn't really matter WHAT we eat, it's all about portion control.

     We also lost three of our stray cats we feed. Taskett, a short-haired tortiseshell, simply vanished one day several months ago, and then and Mocha, a dark brown shorthair vanished as well, and Spot, Taskett's brother, was killed by a car a few weeks ago. However, we do have a couple of new strays, a gorgeous but wild long-haired black cat with a little white spot on his chest just like Spot, (and quite probably Spot's father) that we have named Domino, and there is a tough skinny black and white shorthaired tom we named Tuxedo. And we still have Graylordling , a beautiful long-haired gray cat, and the younger half brother of my Cassira-boodles. Graylordling  is taming down quite nicely.

 That's it for now.