I am in a good mood today.

My mood can be traced to several factors–the sun is shining, dappling through the leaves in the back, making a kind of cool filtered light jazzed up by shockingly bright patches where individual leaves blaze white-green-gold, in thorough defiance of the rule that green is a cool color.

I have a new bookcase! Driven increasingly mad by the mountains of homeless books stacked on every surface, I demanded that we go buy a new bookcase, which we did. The faithful James assembled it last night. His infuriating meticulousness about nailing that annoying sheet of wood-colored cardboard onto the back prompted the following conversation:

J: We’ll need the tape measure…

U: Just eyeball it.

J: But the nails might not be evenly spaced!

U: Dude, you’re nailing a piece of cardboard to the back of a bookcase, not heat tiles on the space shuttle.

J: Okay, but if we have to make atmospheric re-entry in this thing some day, I can’t guarantee it’ll hold!

To my delight, the bookcase actually holds ALL the stray books, and has room for a fair number more, containing my habit for some months to come.

I am also in a good mood because once I finish this Digger, all I have to do today is lounge around, play WoW, read, and nap. This is what I like in a weekend.

My art malaise may not be broken, too early to tell, but I’m actually feelin’ pretty good about the pencil sketches I’ve been doing–the squirrel, particularly, makes me grin involuntarily whenever I glance at it.

And finally, I am in a good mood because a few days ago, I was feeling glum about sales this month–September and October are often fairly slow, with people paying off vacations and spending money on back to school, and the dorm-decor sales usually aren’t enough to offset. Even knowing that, it’s hard not to do the crazymaking thing…”Oh, god, what if people are sick of my art, what if sales are down because the market is saturated, what if nobody ever buys my art again and I have to get a job at Food Lion?”* And then evidentally payday came ’round, and now I have to ship out eight originals and thirty-odd prints, a Herculean amount of mail but one I’m delighted to be afflicted by, and sales are back to being better than last year.

So life is good.

*I’ve gotten pretty good at fighting this particular naggling worry off by now, but I don’t think there’s a freelancer alive that doesn’t think some variant on this during slow stretches.

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