Hocus Focus

I have so many things on my mind to blog about, but I can not focus on one. Scatter brained? I suppose I am. And I have so many things to do as well. I start one project and then go on to another one. I get sidetracked so easily. I need to focus. I thought I would resume painting what I have started a while back, so I started clearing my drawing table of junk. I then got my palette and scraped the dried up oil paint that has been sitting there for months. I got those 2 things done. Got my easel with the unfinished painting on it and dusted it. Somewhere along the way I got distracted by something. Soon the cleared drawing table started to fill up with junk once again.

Now I remember what had caught my eye and distracted me. It was a pencil drawing I have done, 2 of them in fact. One was of little Sue's when she was 5 years old and the other was of Eddie's when he was of the same age. Eddie is 5 years older than Sue, but those were the 2 pictures of them I found nearby when I thought I should try pencil drawing. I had done portrait before when I was in college, but that was a long time ago. And those days I used grid. Now I thought maybe I should not do that and do more freehand style. Grid for a small drawing, I think, is amateurish. It would be alright to use it for a big painting as in a mural, like those I've seen on the side of skyscrapers. Come to think of it. I should take a picture of one of those murals in downtown Los Angeles when I happen to be there. I hardly go there anymore. It takes about 50 minutes driving time to get there. And then there's the parking that would take more time to find.



3 B pencil on 8 1/2" x 11" plain paper

Interesting reading...

From The Week
March 16, 2007

Good week for:

Getting even, after a 7-year-old Wisconsin girl called police to report that her grandfather was cheating at cards. Police have decided not to charge either party.

Overkill, after opponents of late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic dug up his corpse and drove a stake through his heart, apparently to minimize the odds of him returning from the dead.

Making the trains run on time, after President Alan Garcia of Peru kicked off a national punctuality campaign by ordering all citizens to synchronize their watches. Peru's famously carefree attitude toward time, Garcia said, is "a horrible, dreadful, harmful custom." (Uubra kaya sa Pilipinas ito? Isang oras nang huli, okey pa rin.)

Bad week for:

Neutrality, when a group of Swiss soldiers accidentally invaded Liechtenstein during a night-training exercise. The government of Liechtenstein (population: 34,000) said it hadn't even noticed the incursion across it's borders. "It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters," said a government spokesman.

Observing wildlife from the air, after an enraged Alaskan moose brought down a hovering helicopter with its antlers. No humans were hurt, but the moose did not fare well in his collision with the spinning rotor and had to be put down. (Poor deer.)

Romance, after Maria de Jesus Flores, 98, of Mexico filed a complaint against Manuel Martinez, 48, a grocery deliveryman who has fallen desperately in love with her. "I can't have sexual relations anymore," said de Jesus Flores, who added she is weary of fending off Martinez. "I'm 98." (Di kaya malabo ang mata nitong si Martinez?)

Back to normal I hope.

I suppose my blog is back to normal for now. No one knows what would happen next. There are glitches that come once in a while; blogger or any other blog is not perfect. What I was thinking when my toolbar and post editor were missing is that someone had messed up my blog. That happens. There are a lot going on out there, scams, spams, phishing, defacing, and copying. This last one happened to my friend Nini. A blogger lifted her postings and pasted them on his/her (blogger's) blog. It was thievery or in literary term plagiarism. What we don't know is if it was done randomly and she happened to be the victim, or if it was done to her with malicious intent. Luckily she found out in time, before all her postings were copied. With the help of her friends said blog was flagged which eventually caused it to be suspended.

It doesn't pay, this crime
Might as well clean that grime
Underneath that smelly toilet
That's a better outlet
For an anger one might have.

Yuck!

I was in a quandary when my toolbar was missing. I sought help and went to several places, but I could not find the solution to my problem. In frustration I gave up. I thought it might regenerate and correct itself, and it did. Later on while blog hopping I found the solution to my problem at this blog. It's blogger for dummies...ha ha...just right for me.

Hooray, it's back!

My missing toolbar is back, and so are my compose and preview modes. I'm happy...I could cry. Ha ha ha Now, whoever made magic, I should thank. Google people I'm sure did their best to correct this problem. I was not the only one who had this problem. Thank you, thank you.

Happy days are here again, you bet. I'm not ready to post anything yet. My pictures are still in my memory card. I didn't have time to put them in my album, but I will for sure share them with my friends.

Blogger, I have a problem.

Flowers by a friend

A painting in colored pencil done by my friend Nancy. She's a very versatile artist; she can do anything in any media--oil, colored pencil, water color, charcoal pencil, pastel and others. She did this drawing in her spare time, while watching TV--one eye on the TV and the other on her drawing. Just kidding. And right after she finished it she sent it to me via her cellphone to my cellphone. What technology can do nowadays, we can send copies of pictures not only through the internet or fax machines, but also through our cellphones. And the colors never changed, it is as vivid and striking as the original.

I love this painting. Her blending of colors, color combinations and composition are excellent. She truly is a great artist; she has honed her skill with the help of her tutor-- her loving artist husband.