Pears

Played around with this Harmony thing one afternoon. It seems to lend itself to pears.

(All I had to work with was a mouse.  Still -- pears!)

Citrus

I went on a short field trip to an atrium on the campus where I work. I used to hang out there occasionally as an undergrad -- they used to have a koi pond, and the atrium was a lovely warm green space to walk through in the middle of winter. Eventually, stupid people decided that the atrium would be a good place to release budgies and other small birds. I don't know if this was planned by the administration or whether people just started dumping their pets there. The result, though, was that every time you walked through the atrium you risked being pooped on by the increasing bird population.

I hadn't been back there in a few years, but when I visited the atrium a few weeks ago, it hadn't gotten any better -- in fact, it seemed worse than before. The entire west side is covered in droppings and feathers. I walked along the east side to the south side, where I discovered a citrus tree of some kind. They don't grow here, so I stopped for a few minutes to draw the fruit:



The fruit is quite large. It's probably a grapefruit tree. A particularly lumpy citrus was lying on the ground:



I managed to make it out of there without any birds relieving themselves on me. I miss the way the atrium used to be, and it's too sad to visit it now and wonder why no one seems to want to reclaim it and make it a nice place again.

Honey Apples

In the spirit of posting work more often, here are the apfels:



I'm still planning to work on a background for them, but I may not have the time until the weekend. I can't stand working in the dark anyway, and even the days are gloomy and overcast here now. Stupid fall in stupid Alberta.

Really, the last little while has been super-frustrating as far as artwork goes. It seems that every time I have a few minutes to pull out the sketchbook an interruption comes along. Neil's been home sick, which means he's bumping around the house when he'd normally be off Kung Fu-ing. He's in the kitchen when I want to make lunch, and he's on the console when I want to play games, and today I was thinking that maybe, MAYBE I could go sketching at lunch before my lunch meeting (the cow-orkers have helpfully scheduled a bimonthly meeting during my lunch hour; thanks, wankers) before the weather turns really cold. But no. He's got to come in for an afternoon meeting and we'll be having lunch together again. (Lest you think that I'm insane for complaining that husband wants to have lunch with me every day, you should understand that "having lunch" these days mostly means "walking to the food court, standing in separate lines and then dragging the results back to eat at our desks, in separate offices.) I could do without the five-minute walk to SUB and back, only to be stuck at my stupid desk eating my stupid Edo shrimp.

But y'know. I'm not bitter.

I think I'm back in my "Fuck you, human beings! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!" phase. I seem to be feeling it particularly badly this morning.

* * *

Sheesh. And after all that complaining I did, it just so happens that Neil missed his bus and wasn't able to get here in time for lunch. And did I do any sketching? No. Because I forgot my watch on my bedside table this morning and if I go somewhere where I can't see the time, I will miss the lunch meeting.

So, not only am I bad-tempered, but I'm dumb as a sack of hammers too.

Somehow, this has restored my good humour. Now all I have to do is to try and convince the cow-orkers that we should hold all our meetings in HUB mall, where you can buy tasty cafe lattes and which is more interesting to draw in than the meeting room.