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Almost done with my Watercolor Workbook by Sarah Simon.
I painted the center flower as one big wet boundary, but I think it might’ve looked cooler if painted each petal separately. Would’ve taken longer though!
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Books
Watercolors—botanicals 8
Designs from Watercolor Workbook by Sarah Simon (IG: @themintgardener)
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Designs from Watercolor Workbook by Sarah Simon (IG: @themintgardener)
Today is my husband’s 64th birthday, which is significant to GenX and older because he’s officially reached the Beatles definition of old age:
“Will you still need me, will you still feed me, When I’m sixty four?”
Also, I hear there’s football a game going on during a Bad Bunny concert tonight. 😉
Go Pats!
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Designs from Watercolor Workbook by Sarah Simon (IG: @themintgardener)
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Trying to learn to let the paint and the water “do their thing.”
Designs from Watercolor Workbook by Sarah Simon (IG: @themintgardener)
NO KINGS & more watercolor botanicals
Thank goodness I found another indoor hobby besides reading and watching TV. Between the freezing cold weather and not traveling due to my husband’s knee, I needed something.
Even though I’m working with someone else’s designs at the moment, I’m definitely learning some stuff from this book/teacher.
Mark your calendars: The next mass anti-Trump NO KINGS protest will be March 28, 2026.
Here’s the message from the national leadership of Indivisible:
“Our mobilizations grew from month to month last year, exploding from Hands Off in April (3 million) to the second No Kings Day in October (7 million) — and the regime’s ongoing brutality and authoritarianism in the months since have only convinced more Americans, including many who’ve never attended a protest in their lives, to join their neighbors in the streets. Now we’ve got to keep that momentum growing, with the same creativity and dogged determination.
Everything we’ve done so far, and everything we’ll be doing in the next weeks and months, is the stuff of history. And together, we’ll write the history of how, for the second time in 250 years, we the people defied, and overcame, a tyrant.”
The only thing that’s going to stop this authoritarian/fascist train is US—the people. Minnesota showed us that all people of good conscience (left, right and center) must get involved.
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It’s a winter wonderland here in Massachusetts. No sign of the plow guy yet this morning, but the Patriots are going to the Super Bowl – again. Therefore many New Englanders (husband, son…) are in a much better mood than they otherwise would have been. Go Pats!
And some good news: our whiny-ass, murdering, rapist, senile, spray-tanned orange President has announced he’s not going to attend the Super Bowl because he doesn’t like the halftime performer. He’s probably afraid all those Boston and Seattle fans would boo him into oblivion. In any case, Long Live Bad Bunny!
I’m continuing to work my way through “Watercolor Workbook” by Sarah Simon. If interested, she’s on Instagram: @themintgardener. All designs are hers.
I like how the “wet in wet” worked out in the lower yellow flower (upper flower was too dry when I added the darker color). I also like the berries. Author suggested droplets of paint rather than brush strokes.
Unfortunately my paint set doesn’t have one important color for botanicals: Oxide of Chromium. I’m having to make do with Sap and Veridian.
This is painted in the so-called “undefined boundaries” style. It’s fun to somewhat ignore boundaries and let the paint and water do what it will.
Related:
Watercolors – update
As I posted about (a lot), I took a watercolors class last semester and really enjoyed it. I got a lot of nice feedback, both in person and from the very supportive readers of my blog. I put a couple of my paintings in frames (frames that I already owned—not new ones), and my daughter even hung one set of 5x7s on the wall in her living room.
I decided to register for another watercolors class this semester, with a different teacher. Even though I liked my teacher last semester, I wanted to try someone else because I feel like you learn different things from different teachers—especially in the arts. But, lo and behold, the class I chose was canceled due to under-enrollment. So, lesson learned: some arts teachers have followings. If you choose one who doesn’t have regulars (people who re-enroll each term), your class might get canceled.
Rather than scrambling to find another class, I took the refund.
But, I do want to keep going so I’m doing a watercolor “workbook” that my very thoughtful daughter gave me for Christmas.
It focuses on botanicals (which is a sub genre of watercolors, like landscapes) and is fairly structured, compared to the free spirit teacher I had last semester. I’m sure I’ll learn some new things. First step was to swatch out all my colors and then mix new colors according to the author’s recipes.
Thursday Doors—Boston’s North End
There are many beautiful old doors in Boston’s historic North End (aka the Italian neighborhood), but 160 Endicott Street is not one of them.
It is, however, a meaningful door in terms of my life story. I lived there in the early 1990s with my roommate Bridget, a friend from work. It was the last place I lived as a single woman. After that, I moved in with a boyfriend who I later married.
160 Endicott was truly a dump. It was the first floor apartment over a convenience store that I think was some type of front for a low-level gambling operation. Their most popular item was lottery tickets. They had a few dusty cans of soup and literally nothing else you would ever want to buy. The irony was the hand-carved sign, “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.” They never had anything I needed. Not a tampon, not an Advil, nothing.
The apartment itself was totally unrenovated and smelled liked cats. The kitchen was horrible. The bathroom had cockroaches. The downstairs neighbors (who lived in an unfinished basement beneath the store) were always asking to borrow my car so they could drive to the dog racing track up north. But it was in a great location in the heart of old Boston and we could afford it on our art museum salaries, with absolutely no help from parents, which was my main objective in moving there. I really didn’t want to be beholden to my parents for anything. I needed some space from them and my troubled sister.
I took my kids back to visit in 2009. It looked much the same from the outside, but the store inside looked cleaner and nicer. New owners had taken over.
I didn’t ask to see the old apartment, but the green exterior bay window looked exactly the same. And the sign was still there:
The twenties are such a formative decade. So many forks in the road. Decisions made. Paths chosen. Roads not taken.
Memories of my time on Endicott Street include gaining a more visceral understanding of poverty (I thought our place was bad, until I saw how the people under the store were living); finally ending a longterm romantic relationship that had been going on and off for years; great authors—like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou—introduced to me by my roommate Bridget (a reader and a feminist); and food smells—especially Bova’s bakery, open 24/7. Not much in Boston is open all night…but Bova’s is. There are better bakeries in Boston’s North End, but nothing smelled as good as Bova’s at 3am.
Posted for Dan’s Thursday Doors
Books I read in 2025
In 2011, I started keeping a list of books I’ve read in my phone’s notepad, so I could remember them.
Here is my list for 2025 in the order I read them:
“Night Watch” by Jayne Anne Phillips (c2023)
“The Last Train to Key West” by Chanel Cleeton (c2020)
“Florida” by Lauren Groff (c2018)
“The Frozen River” by Ariel Lawhon (c2023)
“Intermezzo” by Sally Rooney (c2024)
“Small Things Like These” by Claire Keegan (c2021)
“Foster” by Claire Keegan (c2010)
“James” by Percival Everett (c2024)
“How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir” by Molly Jong-Fast (c2025)
“Savannah Blues” by Mary Kay Andrews (c2002)
“The Director” by Daniel Kehlmann (c2025)
“Tom Lake” by Ann Patchett (c2023)
“The Covenant of Water” by Abraham Verghese (c2023)
“A Visit from the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan (c2010)
“The Candy House” by Jennifer Egan (c2022)
“The Summer Before the War” by Helen Simonson (c2016)
“Ordinary Human Failings” by Megan Nolan (c2024)
“Heart the Lover” (c2025) by Lily King
Many of these selections I read for my book group, which I absolutely love. We have such good discussions! Three of the four other women in my book club read way more than I do, so it’s sometimes hard to find something that none of them has read before. So this is how we choose our books:
We rotate the job of picking the book. When it’s your turn, you circulate three titles that interest you and the others rank them 1-3. Usually a clear winner emerges without much math needed.
Looking back on the list, I think Florida by Lauren Groff was my favorite. I’m not usually a short stories person, but this collection really blew me away. I read it before heading to Key West for the first time in February. If you’ve spent any amount of time in the Sunshine State, at least one of the characters will resonate with you. There’s a grain of truth in all the “Florida Man” jokes and memes (that’s why they’re funny) and this book goes deep into the truly fascinating and unique characters that seem to be made possible only in that flat, sticky, hot, beautiful, bizarre one-of-a-kind American state.
I read several books by contemporary Irish women authors this year (both before and after my big 60th birthday trip to Ireland in June). Sally Rooney, Claire Keegan, and Megan Nolan are all great. Several of their novels have been adapted for film and TV. I especially recommend “Ordinary Human Failings” by Megan Nolan. I’ve never read a more aptly titled book. Here’s the quote where she uses the exact words. It’s early on in the book.
On one of his first mornings a memo had been sent around from Edward to the desks of the entire editorial staff, which read:
A REMINDER! Reasonable excuses for lateness/missing meetings/not doing something I told you to do etc, include: Bereavement (parent only). Serious illness (life-threatening, your own). Reasonable excuses do NOT INCLUDE ordinary human failings such as hangovers, broken hearts, etc etc etc.
I think it’s the “etc etc etc” that makes this line so good. The story is all about the etceteras.
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