Work proceeds apace. Took a break to doodle some birds. I need to paint more birds. Of course, my scanner’s on the other side of North America at the moment.

Been trying to figure what I want out of life. This is heavy stuff to contemplate, but not as much as you’d think, because I’m already pretty much doing what I want to do career-wise, and I think “figuring out what you want to DO” is the hardest part of that equation.

So other than that, what do I want?

I think I’d like to live in a house–preferably an adobe, pueblo-style, although I’d settle for stucco and terracotta. It doesn’t have to be very big. Two bedrooms would be fine. I want a small, but packed garden. I want to live in the Southwest–CA would work, but I couldn’t hope to afford a house there, so the Southwest is the best guess. I want a patio or a courtyard draped with bouganvillea vines and I want to sit out there in the morning with a cup of tea and watch hummingbirds.  I want to live in a city–not a huge one, neccesarily, but I’ve lived in small towns and out in the sticks and it’s not nearly as fun as it seems. I wouldn’t mind coyotes in the yard, but I want to be someplace where I can get to a bookstore. I’m happy to go walking in parks, and drive out to the wilderness occasionally.

I want to travel when I want to, and see lots of birds. I want my art in galleries fetching reasonably absurd prices and my prints cheap and available to anybody who wants ’em.  I want to write a couple of books that people enjoy reading, and a couple of graphic novels, at least one of which gets turned into a really bad movie so that I can roll my eyes, drain my drink, and say “They butchered it! The monsters! My vision, violated! …oh well, at least the check cleared.”  I want to be comfortable, and free to dabble in anything that catches my fancy, the way I do now. I want to blog and keep people interested.

I don’t know what I want in terms of relationships, and I don’t think now’s a good time for me to make any plans in that regard. Maybe I’ll get married again. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll have a string of lovers and eventually give up to devote myself full time to raising pygmy platypi in tubs in my garden. I don’t know what I’ll decide there, but I trust my future self on this one–she’ll figure out what makes her happy. I leave it in her hopefully capable hands.

I don’t expect to achieve all of this any time soon–if I make it by forty, I’ll feel like I’m doing a good job! Still, ten years is a long time. Ten years ago I was graduating from college, and I’d never sold a painting, and didn’t own a car. So I think that’ s doable–and if anything changes between now and then, that’s okay, too.