Just Too Nice

Who's with me in finding it difficult to believe it is September already? Right on cue, we have weather feeling more like fall than summer, nights so much cooler (even some frost warnings!) and days in lovely comfortable low 70's which I deem just about perfect. The smoke even cleared several days and I was prompted to grab my architecture sketchbook so I could take a break part way through my walk to sit in the sun and capture a few views. The simple shelters at the dog park have caught my attention since they first went up; I'm a sucker for roof angles. I left a lot of fence detail out which not only would take a lot of time but clutter the focus of my drawing. I paid more attention to placement so the two things I wanted to include - the shelter and the tree with its seating surround - did not run off the page. Since I'm not good at drawing people and pets, I generally leave them out, but this time a single man and his dog stayed pretty much still so I almost felt obligated to include them, even if rudimentary. Helps tell the story that this scene is part of a dog park.

And I also couldn't resist spending time on the deck reading when otherwise I might be in the studio. Thus not a lot of progress on my book project. The covers did get cut to size and gessoed, the signatures folded and weighted, the tissue paper pressed. I'm feeling intimidated again with the next step of gluing the tissue paper to the covers. I could find another cereal box if I botched it but I don't have enough tissue paper for a second go. I'll get over it - I always do, with a big breath and a plunge. In the meantime, I finished reading a book and returned it to the library, picking up the next in the series, and let my eyes linger over the new books shelves. I know better than to do this with a 600 page book in hand, and lately there haven't been any new books I was interested in taking home. Not so this time and I ended up with three more books to check out: a thin collection of poems by David Whyte (who I have followed for awhile now and am about to take the 3rd of his recent series of zoom talks), one that is more eye candy than reading, and one that is about mining from a miner's perspective (of interest because it has chapters devoted to two of the mines my dad worked in). Have to hope that those lovely afternoons hold because I have plenty of reading suitable for doing while sitting on the deck.