Settling down on a blustery day

It's the end of March. How the heck did that happen?

Saturday's field sketching workshop at Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory was great fun, although when I first got up that morning I was a little worried. It looked like this:

RMBO's Old Stone House Education Center

Atmospheric and lovely, but potentially challenging for a class that wants to be drawing outdoors. Thankfully it evaporated by mid-morning, as fog in the arid interior is wont to do, and we got to spend some time enjoying the early signs of spring.

Sarah exploring the details of new green grass two hours later.

I'm finally home for a several week stretch and it feels like coming out of an odd dream. Today I've been on my feet all day... charging from task to task and trying to wrestle my life back into some sense of order. No, really.

Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, the first hour-and-a-half of footwork was done on my usual morning walk. Getting outside for a bit is imperative, even (or especially) with piles of stuff everywhere in the studio and ridiculously changeable spring weather out of the studio. We're having a doozy of a day here, moving minute by minute through sun and clouds, ferocious wind, and even some snow showers.

Yes, that's snow on the left and sun on the right.
Frantz Lake, Salida, this morning.

The rest of the day has been errands (accountant to pick up taxes, framer to pick up work, post office to ship aforementioned work to a show, blah blah blah) and administrative tasks, but OOOOH! Look what arrived in the post:

I (Heart) weird chunks of wood.

Uh huh. It's a weirdly-shaped piece of wood. And I'm excited about it. It's going to be my contribution to the City of the World Monumental Collaborative Puzzle Print! (If that's not a mouthful, I don't know what is.) In short, over 100 printmakers from around the world have each received a small piece of one of five large wood blocks to carve and return to the organizer, Maria Arango. She will reassemble the bits and print them all together as five enormous prints... which each participant will receive. Amazing, eh? Personally I think Maria's insane, but she's organized projects like this before so I guess she knows what she's doing. Maria is documenting the process at the blog link above, and I encourage you to check out all the work she has done to get the project to this stage.

Hooray! Writing a blog post means I've been sitting for a little while, but it's time to jump up and get back to it. There are prints to be made, by golly!