Hi, Gang!

It has been a while since I've managed to eke out some time to write up anything to post - and this won't be a long one.

Part of it has been work-related. I've a number of cases, and don't seem to move thru them as fast as I'd like. Our intake system leaves a great deal to be desired, which doesn't help, and I honestly don't think I'm that much slower than everyone else - I do end up with a lot of non-case assignments and meetings. Anyway, I end up dragging stuff home.

I've given myself a deadline for the last time I'll do that, tho; I need the down time to recoup, and I'd like a life outside work again. Sounds familiar, I know.

Lovely having visitors for a week-long stay; unhappily for them their stay started out with a day of heavy rain, and more days of off and on rain. Happily for me, that meant they stayed at the apartment the first day, which meant they were on hand to mop up the water streaming in from the suddenly badly leaking roof. They spent the day putting down beach towels to soak up the drips (and sometimes water sluicing down the wall, not dripping), wringing them out, tossing them in the dryer and putting them down again in what was probably about an every half hour schedule. The power bill will be enormous; I've already warned the landlord I will be handing the abnormal part of it to him.

This did require moving everything out of my bedroom closet, and washing/drying a certain amount of that, which had gotten soaked in some unsuspected leaks - quiet ones, since they were dripping into all this soft cloth.

(A week later, the landlord did show up and patch the cracks in the stone roof. He hasn't been inside to repair damage inside, but he was shown some of the areas. We have had two days with torrential, coming-in-sideways rain showers that ran for 10 to 20 minutes, and it seems to have passed that test - tho there is something weird going on in the closet, still to be checked out.)

However, that perhaps balanced with the good times they had. I did have a friend do portraits of them; we did all attend my painting class; we had a grand last night's dinner at a restaurant on Front Street, with some terrific appetizers and soups. We did get to the exhibits at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute - they've a Titanic program on right now, and they were taken with a show at the National Gallery.

They did, however, delete all my pictures of them off my camera. Phooey.

I'm happy with painting class, and while I don't manage to finish a thing, I've some partly-done studies I'll post. It is a learning process. I fight it a bit - that taste for precision and tight focus is not necessarily best expressed in watercolor - but it is all good for me. Emma is a dear.

I did have a quickie checkup today establishing a relationship with a doctor on island in case of future need. Since I haven't been to a doctor or had a checkup of any sort since I left Durham in 2004, I have a bunch of tests to go thru, all that 90,000 mile checkup stuff - bone density, mammogram, colonoscopy, bloodwork, etc, and a thorough checkup. That comes up in late August and September.

My focus is drifting off to the work I've brought home, already, so I will end this. Back later! No particular rhyme or reason to the pictures - my efforts at watercolor painting, clouds, whatever. I haven' taken a lot of pictures that don't involve water damage lately.