I have been all over the place the last few weeks, thanks to the arrival of the cutest little girl in the world.

Yesterday, my wonderful mother left us to return to the states, so we’re headed back to a more normal schedule now.

I decided that I’m done with the acrylic painting for now and went back to oils:

They just have a buttery goodness to them. I like the way this noni turned out. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on painting – particularly oil painting – over the last couple of weeks and I’ve decided I don’t want to just be “okay” at it – I want to be excellent. To do so will require painting a lot more than I do, so I’m going with Carole Marine’s “painting a day” method and painting as many small canvases as I can in between other work.

On the YouTube front, we hit 75,000 subscribers today.

I feel rather guilty for not producing more content. At this point, I should be cranking it out. Instead, I’m painting pictures of noni and working on a #nanowrimo space adventure novel.

I hit 30k words on it yesterday afternoon. 3,000 words behind the point where I should be at this time in November, but not bad considering all the distractions.

One of those distractions is building a house. I really need to get back to building. This morning our concrete contractor got in touch and is getting ready to work on the slab foundation for us. Once that’s in, I need to spend a month framing up the 20 x 36′ main house on top of it. That will take up my life for a while, but it will also give me more Unauthorized.TV Tiny House Expat Living episode fodder!

With all the projects I take on, sometimes it’s hard to stay focused on any one thing. Oil painting shouldn’t really be a high priority right now, but I sure do enjoy it. It’s probably time for me to have Rachel write up a new work schedule for me so I can get more done each day.