Stolen from chocochan's back entries.

The first ten people to comment get to request a drawing from me-- anything you want, with the caveat that if you try to break my brain I may have to do terrible things to you. Also with the caveat that I'm in Spain, and you may not get your drawing for quite a while, particularly if it requires more colors than black and blue and raspberry and charcoal grey and an odd shade of purple sharpie and possibly red, because those are the only writing implements I have at my disposal at the moment.
As per usual, in return you post this on your own blog (possibly with your own caveats. Unless you too happen to be in Spain and have the same colors of pen than I do.

Lately I've just been hanging out with family and friends, not really doing anything of note. This morning my aunt, my cousin, my brother and I went to a local bakery/ice creamery and spent the last of a gift card that I got for my birthday last year (from a friend who worked there) that's going to expire in a month. And since I'm leaving in 3 days . . . well, we had to spend it all. We all got different sorts of pastries to eat for breakfast, and there was still $9 left on the card, so we got cinnamon rolls for tomorrow's breakfast, along with an eclair that my brother wanted and a cannoli, because my aunt likes them. That was fun; I love Bredenbeck's Bakery and Ice Cream.

Then we went to get plants because I ripped out an invasive weed from the front garden, but need to plant something else there before I leave so that it doesn't come back . . . so we got the plants, and I planted them. We had lunch at my aunt's house, during which my cousin decided that he didn't like macaroni and cheese because of the shape of the noodles (he's a very picky eater) but told us that he would eat the same brand with the shrek-shaped noodles or regular elbow macaronis, just not the straight ones.

You can tell that my life is exciting when one of the highpoints is that minute differences in macaroni. */sarcasm* I wish I could say that things got more interesting as the day went on, but - well, you'll see.

This afternoon I painted a watercolor portrait of my librarian friend's dog. She'd seen some fellow online who painted portraits of people's pets, but that was pretty pricy, so she's just showed me some of the samples of his work and sighed about when she inherits money from somewhere. My thought at the time was, "I could do that," but of course I didn't tell her, and just snagged some of the pictures of her dog from the computer one time when she was busy with someone looking for a book. Then I let the pictures moulder on the harddrive for a few months, but I figured that I ought to make the painting if I was going to, so I did. This afternoon. It didn't look quite as professional as the website guy's, but it does look like her dog (and I don't know what the dogs he was painting from looked like; they could have been good paintings but only so-so likenesses). There were some parts I was more pleased with than others (one side of the face looked real and the other was a bit flat, same with the ears except the bad ear was on the good half of the face), but I suppose that's just an artist's perfectionism. At any rate, she was very pleased with it, and didn't have to pay a hundred dollars, or whatever the guy was charging. In case you're curious, the dog is a whippet and is named Samwise the Brave. She has another whippet named Thalion, but I didn't paint him.

As I was leaving the library, I ran into my junior high history/art teacher, and we talked, which was nice.

I'm currently reading Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, which is a very good endangered species/travel book. It's also hilarious. Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and is nearly as funny with nonfiction.

The only other point of interest was that we ate the eclair after supper, for desert, and I can definately say that eclairs do not improve with age. The chocolate topping wound up sticking to the bag, and the dough was soggy. In my defense, I will say that a) I would not have bought the eclair had my brother not begged for it; I was leaning towards a scone, a muffin, or some cookies; and b) I did offer that he could eat that for breakfast, instead of the "pig's ear" that he got (which is like crossant dough cooked in honey, or baklava without the nuts, and would have been fine all day). I wasn't actually thinking of what the eclair would be like later, but you can see that I was on the right track.

M.