Syracuse Street Scene

This is an Artist Trading Card (atc). It's the same size as a baseball card. It's my first painting of Syracuse. I don't know what happened with the scan. It's kind of blurry.

I'm happy to be painting some more local things. I started this last fall.

I drove for the first time the other day. It felt very natural and easy, I forgot that I hadn't driven for three whole years. I just need to schedule the actual driving part of the test and take it and I will have my license.

Yellow Syracuse Fire Truck

Yellow Syracuse Fire Truck, originally uploaded by Melsky.

Can you see where I did the clumsy editing job here? I took this from my window and my next door neighbor had a big pile of trash in his driveway that showed in the foreground. So I duplicated the snow and covered it!

Today I went cross country skiing. I love that I can walk to go skiing! Sunnycrest park is about three blocks away and when it's not covered in snow it's a golf course. When the snow comes they make trails in it, and there's a ski lodge where they rent skis on weekends. This was my first time cross country skiing ever and I loved it. But I would like to find some place flatter. I did great except for the parts with hills. And there's lots of hills! I don't mind going up the hills but down is very scary and I actually just took my skis off and walked down a few of them.

After shoveling the driveway and then skiing, I was very hungry and made myself a nice piece of salmon and some rice for lunch.

Toronto day and night

Toronto day and night, originally uploaded by Melsky.

Day three and I'm still here. If I didn't have my goal to put something in my store and post every day I'd be in bed now. So it's good to have goals.

This is a painting I did last April. I was living in Toronto at the time and hoping to get more of my work into local stores and galleries. That never happened. Toronto was just a bad place for me artistically. It was a hard time in my life. I'm doing a lot better as an artist in Syracuse in terms of meeting people in arts organizations and galleries and such. Plus I have a much better space for my art. It's a smaller space than my Toronto studio but a better layout, and since this house has so much storage space I don't have to try to cram a lot of stuff in here. It has nice big windows too.

I do miss a lot of stuff about Toronto, like the transit system! I miss being able to walk to so much stuff, all the restaurants, the exciting feeling of being in a big city.

Anyway, back to the painting, it's here:

Toronto Day and Night Painting

It's actually two paintings! I think they would look really cute side by side.

Tomorrow I have goals, besides putting up something else on Etsy and writing about it in my blog, I am going to clean up my studio and send out some cards I made.

Sorry for not responding to comments

I thought I had it set up so I get comments emailed to me on this blog, like I do on my Toronto Photos blog, but I didn't. I just thought no one ever commented! Today when I was going through some old posts I realized that a bunch of people had sent me comments, some of them on more than one post. So thanks for reading and I will be responding to them in the future.

Right now I'm putting off going to the gym, I am all dressed and everything but that's probably why I am reading old posts on my journal instead of actually being at the gym.

It's exactly two weeks until moving day. We found a great house in Syracuse and someone who lives up the street from it wrote me a nice note because they saw my posting on someone else's blog.

The house is three bedrooms and two bathrooms with a washer/dryer hookup, a two car garage that used to be a stable and it has a fireplace and wood floors and a screened porch in the back. I didn't take any photos of it while I was there, but there will be many, many photos in about two weeks.

I can paint the walls different colors, which is great. We hardly have any furniture and won't have much for a while. I sold my painted table, chairs and couch to the new people who will move into this place. I'm going to be looking on craigslist and at thrift and lower price antique stores. My goal is to have all wood furniture and no pressboard ikea type stuff. There's no ikea in syracuse!



My goal is to paint some today. I haven't packed up my paints yet because I might feel like painting and we are not moving for two weeks. But it's been so hot it's hard to think about painting.