My Robert is going in to have his back fused tomorrow.  Since we have most of the wood cut and the work done around here, I have to paint today to use up my time.  After all, what else is an aritst to do but paint?  It gets us through all the good and bad times of our lives.  It's how we cope.  I saw something on the daily painter's website, it said for the daily painters and the habitual painters....I guess I'm an habitual painter!  If I have so many chores to do I'm exhausted, some days I don't paint, but you could say I'm an habitual painter as you always know, I will paint!  Probably so long as there is breath in my body, I will paint.

My grandmother was a painter until she turned about 60.  For some strange reason, she quit after that.  I don't understand it and I never will.  Why would you stop doing something that brings you so much joy?  She painted on rocks, she painted on canvas, she had so much fun.  The day she quit painting, she didn't even clean her brushes, she laid them in her painting box, and never touched them again.  I always wonder what happened on that day that made her quit painting.  My grandpa used to complain about the smell and the mess her paintings made.  Maybe he said something that made her quit?  I just don't know.  He wasn't a mean man, but he wanted things his way and he sure wanted her waiting on him, so I suspect he did or said something that made her quit.

When she gave me her paints and brushes, I asked her why she quit...she wouldn't give me an answer, she just said, "I was done".  So I had to respect that.  But as a family, we all missed her paintings, we loved the way she could make an owl out of a rock and set him on a piece of driftwood so he looked real.  She made little cement feet for them and everything.

  I say I'm going to be painting until the day I die, but who knows?  I could have some life shattering thing happen to me to the point where I lay down my dirty brushes and say "I'm done".

  And if that happened, would any one know or care?

I have no intentions of that happening to me, but how do we know from one day to the next what might happen to us?

I know an artist who painted a portrait of her own mother when her mom was on her death bed in the hospital.  Now that's dedication I don't have.  Maybe the only reason I wouldn't do that, is because I'm not a portrait artist, I don't know.

I guess the thought of surrendering my Robert over to the doctor's knives is getting to me!  Making me have some strange thoughts.  I'll write when this surgery is all over and let you know how it's turned out.  I'll probably stay with Robert the entire time he's in the hospital.  I don't think the nurses take very good care of him.  When he needs something, he can push the  call light and it can take up to an hour for a nurse to show up.  He got hurt at work, he's had to have his left shoulder replaced, his neck fused, now his back will be fused, then they'll operate on his right shoulder to repair a massive rotator cuff tear.  We're getting tired of all these surgeries.  But he's been in so much pain, you get to the point where you agree to it, hoping it will help.

His neck fusion was successful and he had some relief from it.  But when they replaced his left shoulder, they couldn't hook up the supraspinatus muscle so he has no shoulder function.  They also hit nerves in his arm when they did the nerve block so he lost the function in his left hand.  Plus, when they hit a nerve like that, the pain is absolute agony, he's been in screaming pain from that surgery for two years now.

Maybe that's why I don't have a whole lot of faith in this surgery that's going to happen tomorrow.

But no matter what, we'll deal with it, because we have to.  At least we're together and spending our days with each other.

I'm eliminating color from this collection of grey.  I wanted to do some drawing, so I'm drawing these right onto the canvas.  From there, I'm using Bob Ross's white oil paint to mix and blend the grey.  It's a fun experiment and I'm enjoying seeing the greys I get with this process.

It's going to be a continuing series of grey paintings!

Sometimes simple is more beautiful than anything else.

The show season in Montana is over, the kids buckskin pony is turned out on winter pasture. His banged tail is growing out, his roached mane is so long it's about to flop over on his neck. He feels lonely and he's wondering where the kids are. I sure hope they come to see him after school, on weekends, and holidays!

I guess I was feeling silly when I did this card, I was thinking about the way horses rear ends go back and forth as they walk. Their tails flop and their hooves flop up and everything moves!

We visited a wolf keep this weekend and I got some photos of the wolves. It was kind of awesome to stand on the other side of the fence, looking into the eyes of a wolf. We also got married, not at the wolf keep, but in Idaho. That was fun too!