Yesterday was the Northern Neck Artisan Trail Second Saturday on-going event in which, as a member of the Artisan Trail I agree to be home and have my doors open for visitors. This year I’m going to try and have some sort of planned activity or lesson going on while I’m open.

Next month I plan to do a little class on how to attract birds, take their pictures and use Photoshop to edit and prepare reference photos for paintings. I’m developing a list of other 20 to 30 minute classes or demos I can offer so I can fill up the calendar for the year.

This month I did a bird painting demonstration even though at the time I was doing it, I had no visitors. Just as I finished the painting above of a White Breasted Nuthatch and started a second bird painting demo and basically ran out of steam, I had seven people appear. So, I stuck my paint brushes in the can of paint solvent and cleaned my hands. Then I put out a cheese plate, opened a bottle of wine, we enjoyed a tour of the studio and the house and then sat down and talked about art. It was fun.

Just as everyone we preparing to leave, the promised winter storm arrived and it started to snow. It appears to have snowed until midnight or so, then paused for a while and picked back up in the form of freezing rain and sleet around dawn. My internet went down until noon when the clouds finally thinned out and headed out over the Chesapeake Bay.

In the meantime, my husband and I are dealing with cats experiencing health problems. I spent the morning poaching fish filets and boiling turkey necks and picking off the meat. Our little cat, a female who is strictly an indoor cat, has always had skin problems and the vet finally diagnosed it as food allergies. So she has been switched to food that contains no chicken, beef or soy. Believe me, the chicken and soy are difficult to avoid in cat food these days. And, just to make things more interesting, our older male cat started having some sort of urinary tract issue this morning (on a Sunday with a winter storm). I’ll have to take him to the vet first thing tomorrow morning assuming we can get there. There are no emergency vets where we live.