Life has been good. I advertised some goats for sale in the newspaper, and sold two today, as well as arranging a barter for another, and it looks like the others have buyers lined up, too. It's a relief, since I really didn't want to send them to the sale barn. When you do that, you never know who is going to buy them and what sort of life they'll have.

I just finished another painting- this one of three plums. I'm not sure why, but I'm having a difficult time blending one area of color into another. It's not that it can't be done or that I cannot do it, but it doesn't agree with me much. Plums don't generally have broken color, as would say, a peach or nectarine. The colors in a plum flow smoothly and subtly. Not my plums. Oh well. I like them. It seems that I've blended and gradated colors in watercolor before..,maybe not much though. I tend to break the subject down into shapes dictated by the color areas and natural lines, and then fill these in with solid colors. They make have slight variations in tone, any more than that is broken off into another fragment. Anyway, I like the plums. They've got personality, more than the actual fruit did. Which remings me- painting fruit is almost as bad as painting cyclamens! It doesn't move and twist, but it *does* change color, appreciably, from day to day. I'd expect this from a banana, but never before realized a plum did it until I looked, carefully, at the same three fruits over a weeklong period. By the end of the week they were hardly the same, because the shape changes too as they ripen and soften.

The lady at the library really wants me to bring in my art so she can take down some of the other stuff. ;^) And, my friend found a horse trailer I can use to haul the goats to the fair in. Yeah!