August 16, 2003
More rain. Feels good. Smells great out. If only I could bottle and patent the smell of wet creosote. It is so intoxicating to desert rats everywhere.

Painted almost all day yesterday. Working on five different paintings.

The good news is I’m in the zone. The bad news is when I’m in the zone I’m worthless at everything else. Yesterday morning I tried to cook up a batch of cowboy pinto beans. I soaked them overnight, par boiled them for an hour in the morning (this is from my mama’s cowgirl recipe handed down from her mama, Grandma Guess). Went into the office, tweaked copy on Classic Gunfights, O.K.d other copy, came home, turned on the beans to boil for another hour before letting them simmer to a tender morsel and came out to the studio to bail into painting. Really got into it and like I said, I was in the zone.

About four, I was sweating and stuck so I decided to cool off and take a swim. Went over to the house and found a kitchen full of smoke and very burnt beans. Ouch! Really sad. So much for multi-tasking. Or, as my grandma Bell used to say, “It don’t amount to a hill of beans.”

Check out the changes to the website. Trish and Jason have been working hard on making the site more pro-active and it’s very exciting. I realized yesterday it has been a year since I started doing this journal online (I have been doing a journal for nine years).

“You know you are getting old when everything either dries up or leaks.”
—Old Vaquero Saying