Today I went to the art store with three little kids who stood there patiently for several minutes while I agonized over color choices. Last night I was working on a painting and the colors I was putting down just didn't match my reference, either in front of me or from my recollections of this amazing orchid I saw out in a swale up north this past summer. And being the persistent artist, while fully accepting that few colors in pigment match faithfully the ones in nature (or vice versa) I was determined to find something that was closer than what I had on my palette. Would it be permanent rose or quinacridone magenta, or perylene maroon, or winsor red or thalo red or? Well, perylene maroon ended up looking like I had scrubbed a bloodstain for half an hour, winsor red was too warm, ditto thalo -bingo! the synthetic quinacridone magenta was the one!

When the kids went home with their mom I was left to bliss out with my paints and the studies for this new venture. Great - another interruption!! I'm going to pull that darn telephone out of the wall! Oops - can't do that - tied into the internet via cable, my lifeline to my son and my boyfriend - if you want to call him that, being well past boyhood and crazymaking enough that sometimes I wonder if he's as much a friend as some demon fate had ordained to pay me back for every one of my past misdeeds... in this life, and if you believe in reincarnation (don't know that I do, but sometimes I wonder...) and all the ones ever lived since the late Paleolilthic...

But the call is important - a friend had passed away and his daughter-in-law was checking in to see whether the travel arrangements for family members had been all sorted out, and we ended up chatting, chewing away at precious moments I really needed to spend solving problems of composition, value and infinitesimal watercolor details... and, since the friend had been part of our lives for half mine, I provided her a side of him she had not known.

Don was an artist, and the son of a famous artist, Pete Llanuza, whose baseball comics are still highly collectable on eBay, and her question was why, when he was finally able to have the time to paint, why he didn't do more of it? Well, I responded, being an artist is a kind of delicate%