What Comes of It

I completed as much of the steroid course as I'm going to do and, except for a couple of small incidents, the hives are pretty much gone. I hope. I mean I hope they stay gone. I think that one of the things that triggered them was dairy. (Specifically, using milk in my coffee, something which I hadn't done regularly for a long time but which I had taken up around the time the hives started.) Anyway, I've decided to keep my appointment with the allergist, far off though it may be, and discontinue dairy products for the time being.

So that's been a relief.

Yesterday, I had class in the morning. I'm over this class, but there's still another month to go. We have an exam next Thursday and I am woefully, woefully unprepared as of yet. I spent about two and a half hours in the library yesterday studying, so I'm slowly catching up. But there's a long way to go yet.

We had a quiz in class. The instructor has us grade each others quizzes and, by some unspoken arrangement, the group that I exchange papers with automatically corrects each others papers and hands them in with perfect scores. I imagine that this is considered cheating, but as far as I'm concerned it's a small tax the instructor pays for having us do his job for him. He could always grade our quizzes himself if he wanted an accurate assessment of how we're really doing.

And here's my excitement for yesterday: I got a bunch of new art supplies from Dick Blick! I ordered two books, one about drawing that was first published in 1913 and which Walt Disney once said taught him his earliest lessons, and one a kind of free-form adult coloring book. (I'm into coloring books recently.) I also got a set of 48 Prismacolor pencils, a Gelli printing plate, some drawing pens, and a couple of ink pads and re-inkers for them. I love new art supplies!

I've been working in my art journal recently, using the acrylics that came in the kit that Kelly gave me and collage elements cut from the stack of National Geographics that we keep for that purpose. I'm taking a kind of free form approach to this journal, gluing in elements that I'll add to later. (This versus my usual perfectionist approach of trying to make a completed collage on each page.) I've been greatly inspired by an artist I found on youtube named Dede Willingham. She has kind of an unpretentious, shotgun approach to her art that greatly appeals to me. It also doesn't hurt that she's very funny and very, very talented. So I'm letting her influence me for awhile just to see what comes of it.

What else?

Oh! As a reward for various good deeds we did in the past several days, Dave and I went and spent a happy hour in an independent bookstore the other day. Amazon addicts that we've become, we haven't been active shoppers in a bookstore in awhile. The store we went to sells new and used books and I came home with two books for myself and Dave came home with three. It was nice to walk around and touch books and pull them from the shelves and read the back and imagine reading them. That used to be a regular activity for us, book shopping in actual bookstore, but then, like I said, along came Amazon.

Which, to be perfectly honest, I'm generally okay with. I think a lot of people lament the loss of brick and mortar bookstores--and they should--but for every person who does, there's someone else who never had access to a bookstore (because, for example, they lived in the kind of neighborhood where people don't open grocery stores much less bookstores) but who can browse online and get books delivered to their door. So I suppose progress is a mix of good and bad, just like anything.