The sun finally came out, after hiding for the entire month of January, so that was nice. I got a lot of painting done. In many of them, I was able to capture whatever it was I was trying to do, so I consider them successful. Some of them I even like.
Work is continuing to go like a house on fire. Orders are plentiful enough for me to always have a pile in front of me from which to choose. In fact, some fun things happened in the last ten days: Ginny, the gal who owns and operates the shop, posted pics of a Christmas tree skirt on her instagram page that caught the attention of a new customer. He wanted to know all about the design. This is a tree skirt that I designed 25 or 30 years ago, in six different panels, to go beneath a very large tree. Finished, all 6 panels would be well over 6 feet in diameter. Each panel featured a different element of Santa's entourage, the first being Santa himself, the next four having two reindeer each and the sixth would be the North Pole workshop. I've done the first panel for more stitchers than I can count over the decades and several of Dasher and Dancer (at least one of Donder and Blitzen) but no one ever bought the entire skirt, mostly the did one or two panels and had a fabric skirt made around them. It's a huge needlepoint project and so far no one has wanted to dedicate years to the stitching of a tree skirt, so although the idea came to me many years ago, I've never actually designed the final three sections.
Till Now!
This new customer was so intrigued by what he saw online that he wanted to see a sketch of what the whole thing would have looked like, so I whipped off a small scale drawing.
I hope all his friends love it so much that they all take up needlepoint. Those two panels will pay for my next two months of oil painting classes!
Also in February, Jay and I powered through all the seasons of Ray Donovan. Obviously, we really enjoyed it and like everyone else, was surprised that it got cancelled. There's not a likable character in the entire show but their shenanigans and malarkey were fun to follow. Ray himself was completely devoid of looks or charm but inside that cement head of his, he must have had a functioning brain, as he managed to extricate himself and his entire family of idiots from every convoluted scrape they lumbered into. Jon Voight played the loathsome patriarch of this pack of brain damaged wolves and he was worth the price of admission. His Micky Donovan was a loser extraordinaire: everything he touched turned to shit. Absolutely everything. He's the kind of a guy who can go out to buy a pack of cigarettes and instead burns down the 7/11 with everyone in it and he keeps roping his sons into joining him on these lethal little outings and they keep going along with him!! We were sorry it came to an abrupt end. So too, was the entire cast and crew, it seems. Oh well.
There's not that much TV that Jay and I like together (he prefers sports and the news to scripted shows) so its fun when we find one we both like. Over the years, we've watched The Sopranos, 24 and Billions. So when we finished Ray Donovan, we started Peaky Blinders, which we'd heard from several different people was a good one.
I think we got through all 5 seasons in under 2 weeks. Of course, it's a BBC show so each season is only 6 episodes...
I liked it much better than Ray Donovan! First of all, the characters, while being bloodthirsty gangsters are much more charming than anyone in the Donovan clan. Oh, not all of them; Arthur is a psycho and John is nearly personality free but Thomas is rational, complicated and occasionally brilliant while the women in the show are all very interesting characters in their own rights, whereas the only females in Ray Donovan were as moronic as their male counterparts. In fact, Elizabeth Gray (aka Polly Shelby) is my favorite character in the show and she's awesome. She reminds me very much of a woman I used to know; she's the type who can tell you to go to Hell and make you look forward to the trip, then send you there herself if you get on her bad side, and look like the entire cat walk on fashion week while she does it. Oh, the show is set in the decade after WWI and I have to say, the fashions of the 1920s are second to none in pure awesomeness. The hats!! The coats!! The dresses, shoes and accessories!!! Velma Kelly's got nothin' on Polly Shelby.
Oh, I just looked up Helen McCrory, who plays Polly and found out she's married to Damien Lewis, whom I've loved since I first saw him in Band of Brothers! He played Col. Winters. He also plays Bobby Axlerod, my favorite character in Billions. Huh. No, I didn't care for Homeland and bailed after the first season. Usually I have no trouble embracing any shows particular stupidity but that one left me cold, even though I'm a big fan of both Lewis's and Mandy Patinkin.
Since the last time I posted, I've probably read six books, all different kinds and I liked most of them but have now forgotten what they were. Oh well. Right now, I'm reading The Anti-Mary by Carrie Gress, Things that Matter by Charles Krauthammer and Confessions by St. Augustine... wow, I must be super smart and fancy. Nope, just happened to pick them up. Well, no, St. Augustine I've been meaning to read for years and I only open it once a week so it's taking months. It's amazing to me how on point he is; the complaints he makes about modern society sound like they were made this week, not 1600 years ago. Society's penchant to prefer style over substance, for instance. I've taken to using a highlighter as I read, as some pages have three or four lines that I want to be able to refer back to.
Oh, before I began the Krauthammer book, I read Fleabag (the scriptures) that my daughter gave me for Christmas. It's the full scripts of the show and was so entertaining that I had to watch Fleabag again, for like, the fourth time. When I'm done with Krauthammer, I think I'll reread Freddie and Fredericka, by one of my favorite authors, Mark Helprin. I first read the book when it was published in the 90s and haven't since. I only remember that it was gut bustlingly funny and I haven't read anything purely funny in a while.
I don't do new year's resolutions and it's a good thing. If I did, I may have resolved to write more often and clearly, that's not happening.