The hilarious expression is typical! I think my next project is actually going to be a self/group portrait based on this picture, taken after Nefarious made tiaras for all of us a few weeks ago.

We went to the ROM and checked out the reopened dinosaur exhibit, but to be honest, Nefarious far prefers the mummies… I think other than the play area and the bat cave, that’s her favorite. Anyway, I forgot to post our gingerbread house — the construction went perfectly, although I do admit that it rapidly degenerated into what’s basically just a platform to hold an enormous amount of candy in a thick layer of icing…

For our Christmas tree, instead of setting up a 3D tree, we painted a six foot high tree on a discarded canvas (Caitlin’s idea), and then made lots of decorations and glued them to it. I think Santa will be quite pleased — it may not look as “fancy” as a normal tree but it’s a much more fun family activity I think.

Other than that, loads of ice skating, sledding, and other winter holiday fun is being had.

Second: If anyone has any ideas as to why this blog renders its archive and index pages wrong on IE (other than “IE sucks!”), please drop me a line so I can fix it… Or switch to FireFox!

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Third: I’m still alive and doing fine and looking forward to a wonderful holiday period with Nefarious and Caitlin and others, and am as always, working to create lots of new stuff. A couple more paintings are now on the go — on the left is “Where Water Snakes Come From” “The Origin of Water Snakes” and on the right is “Owl’s Adventure III” (on wood panel).

I’m also giving a lot more thought to the idea of the children’s art museum, and perhaps launching a children’s clothing line at the same time. I was being interviewed by a doctor yesterday as part of my ongoing legal stuff, and he asked me how I saw myself, and I told him that I saw myself as someone with a deep drive to create things of beauty, bring them into the world, and share them with as many people as I can.

We’d actually planned to go to Riverdale Farm today (which we did do), but on the walk back to the car we passed the necropolis and read the gravestones, and actually took about a two hour detour through the graveyard (and insists on returning tomorrow — future zombie hunter?). She’s at a wonderful age where rambling storytelling that’s 75% fact and 25% fantasy is what it’s all about. Because PlanetSpace is talking about building the first Canadian spaceport near our homestead on Cape Breton Island — which I’m very excited about — we spent some of our after-supper time drawing rockets and watching videos on YouTube of shuttle launches, space walks, and moon missions… The funny thing is that all of the space things that I was convinced I’d experience as an adult are now the things I’m convinced she’ll experience… I hope my predictions are more accurate now than when I was a child.

I feel that I am much more of an illustrator than a writer… if anyone reading this feels the opposite about themselves and thinks they can write the story for a children’s book, drop me a line with your ideas! I wrote a couple of outlines but I haven’t been that happy with the specifics.

That said, admittedly it’s generally just funny little drawings and stories on junkmail envelopes… I must have hundreds of these lying around the house (that’s both a reflection on how much we draw and how little I clean I suppose, heh).

A friend of ours is having twins and her baby shower is today, so we used these scraps to make her a card over breakfast.

My daughter loves hearing stories about growing up on a farm, and asks me to tell her about all the different experiences and to illustrate them at length — which helps keep all my kooky meals getting consumed. Today I cooked my own version of a Manwhich — a curried rice and fresh veggie dish on raisin bread. People laugh when I use raisin bread, but I figure if you can cook most dishes with raisins, you can serve most sandwiches on raisin bread, right?

Those are Highland Cattle by the way — wonderful little furry indestructible beasties… She wanted to hear the story about the one-eyed bull (one of his cowfriends poked his eye out by accident at the hay feeder)… Here in the city we mostly have squirrels. I suppose it’s better than nothing, but they’re not particularly exciting.

There’s also a fat raccoon — one of many on this block — that appears to live on my neighbor’s porch. He’s quite happy there and doesn’t seem to leave much, and curls up in a little ball in the base of that umbrella to sleep. Not such a bad life… No predators other than the government.