Snow Scene

For the January Heart of Texas Tolers meeting, we painted a winter barn scene. I did mine on a 5x7 canvas. It was a fun, easy painting day.

999 Book Challenge

Library Thing has a group that is doing a 999 challenge. Read 9 books in 9 categories by 9/9/09. You get to pick your own categories. I think it sounds like a fun way to push yourself to read new things. I'm going to be ambitious and read 9 adult and where appropriate 9 children's/ya books.

I've picked the following categories:
1. Award winners--Pulitzer, National Book Award, Nobel, etc. I will stick with fiction for these.
2. Classics--I'm going to try to keep this to classics I've never read, but I think I might sneak in a few that I just want to reread.
3. Biography/Memoir
4. Historical fiction--I'm shooting to do one book from a different time period, and try to do some different countries too. Most that I've read in this category tend to be set in England.
5. Mysteries--I'm planning on picking different locales for this one. For example, Burke's Robicheaux stories take place in New Orleans, Alexander McCall Smith in Botswana, and another in Scotland. I think this might be hard in the children's/ya area, but we'll see.
6. Science Fiction
7. Graphic Novels
8. Fantasy--I've been reading a fair bit in this genre, but I really want to get more breadth so I will try to focus on authors I haven't read before.
9. Horror--including supernatural/paranormal. This last category is the only one that I think might change. I don't do a lot in horror, because I'm a complete and utter wimp. However, I do love vampire, and other supernatural creatures, stories. A lot of the kids I've helped find books at work like scary stories.

Mo & Eva

They've been sleeping closer together now that it's gotten a bit colder around here. They are so cute when they snuggle.

Mural

After six months of daydreaming, planning, reading about murals, I finally finished it! I'm so pleased with how it turned out. I based my design heavily on Cathy J. Mayer's Tuscany pattern, which was an oil painting, and then also used instruction and acrylic color choices from Debby Forshey-Choma's Tuscany vineyard bowl, and Kathy Swigon's Tuscan clipboard patterns. This was a major thing for me to scale up a pattern, modify to fit my approximately 20" x 55" surface, and to figure out colors and instructions. I'm very much a follow the pattern and instruction kind of girl.

I'm pretty pleased with the results, and I think it really spruced up the entryway. It's nice to finally enhance that niche and really make it a focal point when you walk in. Tony did a great job cutting the plywood for both the shutters and the mural. No easy task to get that curve! And he had a lot of fun using his nail gun to get everything in place.

Entryway

We got the shutters hung on the entryway niche today. The mural should be done later this week. I can't get over what a transformation just the shutters make. I can hardly wait to see the change with the mural!

Snowman ornament

I whipped up this cute little snowman ornament for Tony's gift exchange for work.

Christmas

We got the outside of the house pretty well decorated. The snowmen I painted turned out quite well, and the lights look lovely. The cats are very happy to have the Christmas tree up. They love sitting under and looking at the lights. Eva likes to dive under the tree skirt. Not sure if she's looking for presents or a mouse!