Says it right there in ink and watercolor.
Start as I mean to go on.
Actually, I'd be fine if I didn't have to do that much more snow shoveling,
but perhaps I can take that drawing to mean more attention to my house and garden as the season demands --scrubbing the toilet and turning the compost pile and weeding and such. You know.
My life is already packed with things I like doing --
so many that the best I can hope for is focus and simplification.
Adding a few refinements to my sketchbook diary practice
(ink and watercolor over the pencil and maybe a few more hourly comics),
is probably not an unreasonable dream though,
especially since I started with the ink back in October.
I've also been playing music pretty steadily for the past 11 years, so a little more time every day with my amazing new baritone concertina to strengthen my fingers, learn tunes and help the bellows become more flexible etc. is not out of the question.
Everything in moderation, right?
Looking back at this first entry in my first comic diary (which I didn't even know I was starting),
I see that the problem of competing ideas and projects is a recurring theme.
Funny how every day feels fresh as I'm living it,
every angst brand new,
even as I keep repeating myself.
is the fun of returning to the old images.
Flipping through old Moleskines (I'm on the 9th since 2012),
I often crack myself up.
Not so entertaining are the wordy journals of my youth which, though sometimes sweet, are not things I enjoy revisiting-- and certainly nothing I'd want anyone else to look at ever ever ever and certainly not out here on the internet.
For decades, these have languished in a box in basment beside worn out boots and term papers I wrote in 1975.
In they went, layered with eggshells and apple cores,
without regret..
The worms and microbes and spent tomato vines and bits of yarn and corn cobs and ideas and carrot tops and that stupid mean thing I did in 1986 are busily transforming themselves into nourishment for the future while I get on with the essential business of learning a new tune.
How about: Grandma Hold the Candle While I Shave the Chicken's Lip?

My wonderful sister Evelyn R. Swett, however, will enter the the growing season with buckets of black gold.
A glorious gardener, Lyn is particularly passionate about compost
and has just created a little book, Compost Compositions, with some of her amazing photos.
How cool is that?
Maybe that snow shoveling drawing up at hte top of the page means I might get to be more like her this year!
I can only hope.
Anyone know a tune about compost?