My First Blog Award!

This is truly exciting! I am very honored and humbled to accept my first blog award from fellow equine artist, Linda Shantz, whose blog I guested on last month. Thank you very much, Linda!

The past two weeks have been busy ones, filled with appointments, tweaking my new website design, raking leaves and other assorted duties. Happily, I finished up my latest short stint in Physical Therapy on Friday and am looking forward to more days at home when I don't have to run to town for any reason. That will allow me to get back into the studio again and do some early season gardening to get the beds ready for summer. I don't want to be out there in the heat working this year like I have the past two years.

While I'm writing this, I'm also backing up my computer. Once all those images are safely saved onto disks, I can erase my two camera disks and be ready to shoot more photos.

Finally, I'd like to thank my friends, Linda Shantz and Judy Johnson for visiting my newly revised website and giving me thoughts on how well it's working. As I mentioned before, Linda does a lot of Thoroughbred race horse paintings, and Judy is doing a series of shelter dogs paintings which she sells to benefit her local shelter. They are really cute paintings which she also sells as prints. Please visit her blog and pick out a shelter dog of your own to take home.

That's it for today. I would still love to hear from anyone else with your thoughts on my new website design. I think it's already paid off, as I got a call this week from someone who is interested in buying one of my paintings that I hadn't put up for sale yet. He'll call back next week. I hope, I hope, I hope!!

Thank you for visiting, and a Happy Mother's Day weekend to you all.

The Phantom Blog Award

About six weeks ago there was a flurry of blog awards being passed out amongst a group of bloggers that I read regularly. Some lucky bloggers received two or three awards while I received none. I have to admit that I was pretty bummed about this and grumbled to myself about how such things were nothing more than popularity contests between friends and SO middle schoolish. I was definitely indulging in some sour grapes.

So, when I received a comment on my blog last weekend that I’d been given a blog award, I couldn’t help but feel a bit elated and redeemed. The award was given by someone I don’t know, but she failed to attach the actual award image. Having never received one before, I didn’t know what the protocol is and whether or not I had to name the seven things about myself first or what. I managed to track her down on the internet and politely sent her an email to enquire whether it was an oversight on her part that I hadn’t received the award image or if there was something I was supposed to do first.

It’s been a week now, and I never heard back from her. Now I have to assume that this was some kind of cruel hoax or perhaps she had notified the wrong artist and was too embarrassed to admit it. I’ve removed her comment from my blog to protect the innocent (or is that the guilty?) and am putting the whole incident behind me.

Something positive did come out of this whole blog award thing, though. It made me stop to think about why my blog is not more popular, and I realized that I’ve posted a lot of negative, woe-is-me thoughts over the past two years. Instead of posting new artwork, I’ve posted a lot of why-I-haven’t-done-any-artwork posts. I resolved immediately to make my posts more upbeat and try to inject some humor into them. That’s a tall order for someone whose sense of humor tends to be quite dry, but I’ll do my best from now on.

Today’s photo is a view from my studio window. It shows the ice in the lake receding as the wind-blown waves chip away at its edges and as the sun has melted its thickness. This can be an anxious time for us lake dwellers for a day or two when we worry whether or not the ice is going to demolish docks and boat houses as the wind drives it relentlessly eastward. So far we’ve been lucky, but I did watch helplessly one year as the ice wiped out our neighbors dock and boat house supports. It was a good lesson in the powers of Nature.

Normally, as soon as the ice goes out of the lake, the ducks and swans appear in our beach and the fishermen return in their boats. I’m already seeing large flocks of flight ducks making their way back toward Canada. Perhaps a crane will stop by one of these days, too. They are so shy that I haven’t managed to get a good photo of one yet, and they only visit for a day or two each season. But, I keep hoping that THIS season will bring better luck.

There is no sun today because we’re expecting yet another winter storm tonight and tomorrow. Will THIS be the last gasps of the winter of 2008-2009, or does Mother Nature have more surprises in store for us? Don’t put away those snow shovels just yet!