Sedona Rocks
Seonda, Arizona, USA
Moleskine Watercolor Sketchbook
Schminke, Utrecht, Da Vinci tube paints
November 23, 2017
I hope everyone has had a nice Thanksgiving. I am a bit amazed that I am not at work this evening. Since I'm working Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, the most difficult shifts to cover in the hospital, I decided to take Thanksgiving off. I'm still surprised that I didn't get a frantic call at 5pm that they were short due to call-outs and such. But then again, that doesn't usually happen for Thanksgiving. That tends to happen more often on Christmas Eve.
So it's been a quiet day. I switched my sleep around, so I slept last night, and didn't bother to set an alarm for Thanksgiving morning. So I woke up on my own at about 930am, and have spent most of the day just lazing about, watching TV, casting YouTube video's, and painting. Our only definite plans today was dinner at 7pm. I was able to talk Brent into eating Thanksgiving out this year, and thus avoid the ridiculously huge amount of leftovers, and the week of overeating that always happened after Thanksgiving. We're both sort of struggling with our health this year, with my kidney stones and his back pain, and I'm glad we're limiting the Thanksgiving gluttony to one evening. So Thanksgiving Dinner this year will be at Buca di Beppo. It's an Italian restaurant, but one of the restaurants in our area that is serving a traditional Thanksgiving menu. But the really cool thing is that the restaurant sells itself as comfort family food, so we don't have to dress up (which we - especially me - are loathe to do).
We did hit a snag at the restaurant. It turns out that I had made our reservations for the 22nd, not the 23rd. There was a huge line to get into the restaurant, and when I got to the reservation desk, she couldn't find our reservation. So I (haughtily) took out my cell phone, pulled up the screenshot of the reservation confirmation, and held it up in front of her. That's when she politely informed me I had reserved for the wrong night. The crowd of people around me let out a gasp of astonishment, and I humbly retreated, and had to tell Brent and a friend joining us that I had basically Fucked Up Thanksgiving. I had resigned myself to a Whopper Combo via the Burger King drive thru, when Brent managed to quickly get on his phone and made a reservation for an hour later at the other Buca Di Beppo, which ironically is much closer to our apartment. So we did get a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, where we gorged ourselves with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans and pie. When I got home, I promptly took my pants off and slipped into my robe, I was that stuffed.
I don't have anything special planned for the rest of the evening. Brent and friend are putting up the Christmas tree (they hit another snag, a string of dead lights, so they are presently at the neighborhood Target... on Thanksgiving... I hope to see them again at some point). I'm going to paint some more. I've been on a roll, painting about 2-3 paintings a week. I have found that this has greatly improved my technique. I sometimes don't get to paint for extremely long periods, sometimes going for more than a year without painting, and then I basically have to start from scratch regaining the muscle memory, and figuring out what has worked in the past. The painting above is in an old Moleskine watercolor notebook that I had abandoned more than a year ago. I didn't like the landscape format of the pages, and had switched to pads and blocks, but for some reason, this notebook was what I chose when I painted my first plein aire painting a few days ago. I find that, unlike my other watercolor notebooks, this one lays really flat, without much wrinkling of wet pages, so I'll probably use this notebook more than my Stillman Birn, or Handbook notebooks. Their paper is nice enough, but when I turn the page after a completed painting, the left panel is often too bowed and warped to take a wash properly. I don't seem to run into this problem with the Moleskine notebook.
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