10 hours into it: This has been a productive weekend - in the studio and out (the only thing I should have done that I didn't was finish the laundry).

I've started laying in the tesserae on the first desert mosaic. It seems to be coming together well. My only worry is that I will need more variety of desert-colored stone. If there wasn't several inches of snow on the ground I'd go beach combing or climb up sugarloaf and gather some stone. When I was cutting up some of the stone I had on hand I found one tile that was a deep rusty orange. It was only a 6 inch tile, but I got as much usable ...

Goodness for January 9-15, 2012 Monday: two-minute intervals of being in love: I can’t remember if he touched my arm or I his, but our hearts synched while he was giving me directions Tuesday: closing my to-do list and opening a magazine – not because I was done, but just because Wednesday: making sense of a colloquial phrase that never meant much until now

How is it that twenty four hours can take forever, a week rushes past you in what feels like minutes, the year disappears in the time it takes to blink, and the whole course of your life can change in a split second?

It seems that much of my art work is inspired by place these days - place, or the environment, the world around us. Tonight I started working on a set of desert-inspired mosaics. I've done a good number of pieces that are about water and these next two or three will be about the lack of water. I spent a lot of our hike in the Mojave a couple weeks ago thinking about how I would represent a desert in a piece - not the Mojave, per se, but the ...

Some people would rather be strung by their toenails on a clothesline than deliver a public speech. I am not one of them. I owe much of this to Mr. Hyler, otherwise known as Jer, the bod, to the Eastwood Raider Class of 1987. Mr. Hyler was one of those teachers who had something good to say to everyone and he was able to draw the best out of the shy or most unlikely suspect.

Thing 1 had this to say about Martin Luther King, Jr.: "AWESOME!" Thing 2 piped in to elaborate on King's achievements all before the age of 39...and then kindly pointed out that I was 43 and had not been nearly so successful in my own attempts at change. He continued by sharing that King's untimely death left him unable to continue his work and, "At least you're still kicking, mom."

A few images of recent mosaics. These two new mosaics are going to be in a multi-artist show at LaChica Art & Music in Las Vegas in February. The show theme is nature-inspired abstracts.

"Hey guys! I am pretty excited. I am teaching a class at our local university." "How can that be? You don't know anything." Thing 2 pauses as if to choose his next words carefully all the while knowing it is too late. He plunges ahead. "Every time I ask you something, you say you don't know."

Goodness for December 19 – 25, 2011 Monday: full arc rainbows, all day long Tuesday: the American-English words I was asked to describe in class: hot (like “attractive”), fall (like “autumn”), crunch/crash (supposed to be crush, like “infatuated”), try out, freak out and BJ Wednesday:  sídra