A Midsummer Night's Blog

I hope everyone had a good 4th of July.  I'm not much into fireworks so I stayed in, while my husband biked to see the city fireworks display.  He said it was worth the effort.  I had plenty of booming around home with many neighbors setting off their own fireworks.  And plenty of barking with my dogs objecting to the booming!  So not exactly a quiet night, but at least the neighbors stopped (or ran out of fireworks) by midnight.  Maybe they had to get up for work the next morning too!  

It's kind of amazing to us that Florida is actually fairly cool compared to many states north of us.  The heatwave sounds miserable, especially for the states that are dealing with power outages after the recent storm.  And those terrible, destructive fires in the west...really tragic losses for so many.  So while it IS hot here, and humid of course, it's the normal Florida summer pattern, and we're getting rainstorms most days to cool us down.  We feel fortunate at this point, and hope things improve very soon for the rest of the nation.

I am excited to be starting this weekend to construct the wooden gift baskets I'll be painting for the Christmas season, for my etsy shop.  I'm so lucky to have my husband's help!  I'm pretty handy with a scroll saw but not so much with a circular saw...we usually do woodworking projects together.  I'm planning to make six to begin with, and go on to wood ornaments and other ideas I have.  In past years I painted things as Christmas gifts to family and friends, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they do on etsy. 

I have been working on my daughter's painting this week and have made good progress.  If I have time I'll work on it again this weekend.  I feel I need to clear the decks before I get going on the Christmas projects anyway.  I love when a painting starts to come together.