I'm not, not at the moment, anyhow, but I understand there's a good chance we'll all be doing so by the end of the day. I don't mind...I keep hoping these occasional rainstorms will eventually break the heat wave. What I long for is a long stretch of days...a month or two...where the temperature hovers around 75, never going higher than 78.

But I'm okay with sunshine, for as long as it lasts. Except that I've lost my sunglasses. Can't think where I would have left them, but I do tend to walk off and leave things these days so I'm not surprised. (Maybe I lef them in the classroom last night?)

Whoosh. Also, I've made five phone calls and sent an e-mail and it's only 8:40! I'm not sure where this mad rush of productivity came from, but two more phone calls and I'm once again out of work to do, so I'm slowing down now. Wouldn't want the well to run dry this early in the day. (Of course, there are four or five phone calls I could make for the DarkGlass study, now that I think about it.)

Tidying up some papers, I ran across $1k worth of expenses that I haven't turned in. I mentioned them to Buehler yesterday. If I'm going to be unemployed, I'm going to need all the money I can lay my hands on. I'm thinking of new things I'm going to need to spend money on all the time...like it just occurred to me that when my insurance fades out, I'll have to pay for these two prescriptions myself...or give up the HRT and go psycho again. It's $30 with my insurance. I hate to think what it will cost if I become uninsured.

I fear I am insufficiently caffeinated to be writing blog entries. This limps and plods where it should gambol and frolic.

Hold on a sec...back in five.... (Oooo! My sunglasses! They were in my bag! Cool.)

Okay. I got coffee, made another phone call, and ate an egg.

Eggs get a bad rap. In spite of the fuss about cholesterol (and they're reconsidering the impact of eggs on cholesterol), they're the perfect breakfast food. I can eat 200 calories worth of yogurt and be starving again thirty minutes later, because it's mostly carbohydrates. I eat one 70-calorie egg, and I'm good to go for a couple of hours. My doctor approves of the non-fat yogurt because of the calcium, so I'm still eating it, but not for breakfast.

One good thing about taking an evening class is that it keeps me from sitting around the living room, snacking all evening. It's a pity that the two classes I wanted were both on Wednesdays. If they'd been on different days of the week, I could have saved myself 1,000 calories a week. That's enough to lose another whole pound a month!

And, speaking of drawing class, how did that class go last night, you ask? (Well, no, you don't give a shit, but since when has that ever stopped me?)

First off...location. Scary. It wasn't "East Colfax" (notorious for streetwalkers, drug deals, and strip clubs) but it missed only by about four blocks. Not a nice neighborhood at all. I admit that I was a bit worried, but it turned out okay.

Second...instructor. Oksana Ross. She's brilliant. With a long career of teaching art and art history behind her (and seemingly a familiarity with everyone who has been anyone in the art world for the last half-century), she's still gentle and encouraging to the no-talent beginner. (That would be me.)

It turns out we did need to provide our own supplies and it was good I'd taken a pencil and a pad. It was the wrong kind of pencil, but at least I had it. I got the supply list and top of tonight's To Do List is shopping, because I have homework to do!

And it turns out that I'm unexpectedly brilliant at charcoal. (Okay, relatively speaking.) I always viewed charcoal with deep suspicion, thinking of it as a complicated and fussy medium fit 0nly for experts. Who knew it was the ideal approach for a beginner? It's flexible, forgiving, and fast. What's not to love? (And messy, yes. Angie and Tonya* had fingers dusted with charcoal by the end of that exercise. My hands were covered in the stuff.)

The one decent thing I turned out last night (a landscape) was done in charcoal. Yep, I did a landscape. Foliage! (Well, a little foliage.) (Okay, a couple of tree trunks.) And a handful of other things. After 40 minutes worth of chit-chat, we dove right in last night. We practiced lines (Horizontal. Vertical. Angled. Curved.), turned our initials into decorative monograms (I was astonishingly bad at that), did a teensy landscape to practice composition (in pencil), and then did the big, charcoal landscapes (9x12).

There are only three students in the class. One is a teacher who actually taught grade-school art in the past. The other is a friend of the class teacher and has the 'artist's touch' in that even her practice sketches were imaginative and original.

And then there's me who, when told to draw a circle and put my initials into it to form a design, just drew a plain circle and then wrote my initials in it.

I am unquestionable The Goat of the class.

I don't mind. (Someone has to be the loser and in a small group I always try to insure that it's me, to save anyone else who might be sensitive about such things from experiencing the pain.) (It's a thing I inherited from my mother.) (In her case, it took the form of eating the broken cookies.)

Someone has to be The Goat and while I do have a certain amount of ego about my writing (in that I want very badly not to suck major sewage) I don't feel that way about drawing. It's very liberating to suck so badly. For instance (like the time I tried bowling, in an attempt to Bond with coworkers at a previous job), there's nowhere to go but up. When you start with an average of 46, any improvement at all is a leap of brilliance. My reasonably successful stab at a tree last night garnered as much or more praise as Tonya's delicate and complex full landscape.

Anyhow, since before I wandered off the topic, I was discussing shopping, I need new paper, some pastels, and rather a lot of charcoal since I anticipate going through a lot of it. I need different kinds of paper. Some paper has more "tooth" (i.e., texture) than other paper and I need both kinds to practice on. And I need different hardnesses of charcoal. And a set of pastels.

And (gulp) ink. It just says, "india ink" on the list, but I'm sure she means us to get something to apply it with, aren't you? So...there are brushes and pens, both of which frighten me, but brushes frighten me a lot more than pens, so I'm sure she means brushes. Maybe I'll call her and ask.

I had a great time. The two hours flew by and I was sorry to see the end of them. I have five drawings to complete before next Wednesday's class, so I need to get practicing. I have to do a Still Life, a more finished Landscape, redesign my Initials Monogram, turn my name into a design, draw a chair, and draw some shoes. These assignments puzzle me to a certain extent, especially the two middle ones, but considering how much I've already learned about how much I don't know, I'm going to trust the teacher and do as I'm told.

(She asked if any of us had drawing books and then asked who they were by. I refused to admit that I bought "Drawing for Dummies" or that none of the books I bought were purchased because of who wrote them but rather because of the simplicity of the presentation.)

I'm probably having tomorrow off (unpaid) and I can certainly use the time. I have a great deal to do, most of which will involve getting covered, head to foot, in charcoal while I'm making happy messes.

__________________

* Angie is the former teacher and currently works at a quilting store or something. She's an English major, like myself, so we bonded over that and over my story of how my mother and her sisters sent me a gorgeous, handmade quilt for Christmas one year.

Tonya is...she's amazing. A Russian immigrant with one of those families where everyone is an astrophysicist or rocket scientist. She's a computer programmer herself, so along with being Naturally Artistic, she's brainy. And, yes, beautiful. If she wasn't such a sweet person, all of that would annoy me, but she's charming and funny, too.