A Fresh Start

Starting 2025 with SO MUCH LUCK. The stars aligned with a glorious opportunity to spend a week in the Caribbean with friends and sunshine and beautiful beaches and lots of laughing.

Things I learned:

• When it takes you four Uber drivers and two hours to go 1.2miles from the airport it’s definitely an adventure.
• Getting an International Driving Permit may give me to PERMISSION drive, but doesn’t transfer over the skills to actually do so.
• My husband gets ALL the driving points.
• You know the driveway where you are staying is steep when you can’t get the car to the top without a great deal of practice and creativity.
• Also, when the sensors go off and the windshield fluid goes right over top of car while attempting to go down.
• In related news my husband’s sexiness level increases with the amount of traffic and switchbacks.
• When you go to a French speaking Island and none of your party speaks French, it is a bit more adventure-y than perhaps you’d previously considered.
• Our resident extrovert wins ALL the non-driving points for boldly attempting to communicate when the rest of us may have (absolutely would have) wavered (and may or may not have sidled away to await developments on more than one occasion).
• The word “lambi” is not French for lamb. You’ve been warned.
• When the French lady compliments the resident extrovert’s attempts to speak French as “almost good” – and you know it’s a really good compliment.
• “Almost good” should be a goal – being willing to throw yourself in and fail spectacularly, but not completely – because you freaking tried.
• Google Translate is truly awesome.
• Google really won this vacation – it didn’t occur to any of us to research things like street sign meanings or driving rules. Whoops?
• No parking signs and Do Not Enter signs are not the same. Confusing the two and freaking out the driver is ill advised.
• When the Nav system routes you into someone’s backyard, I think you can honestly claim you’ve seen the “real” Guadeloupe.
• Flexibility is key. If we hadn’t confused the dates for the chocolate tour we attempted, we would never have seen the waterfall.
• FYI: Chocolate does not improve airplane cookies.
• Beach, beach, and more beach . ‘Nuff said.
• When you check the driving time the night before and it says 45 minutes, and you add a half hour to make sure you get there on time, but in the morning the drive has grown to an hour and 17 minutes so you are already late, but you go anyway hoping you can make up time, Nav system alterations randomly add and subtract time, and you get to the gate only ten minutes late hoping the boat will have waited for you, only to find out the tour people may have known you were stupid and had a start time of a half hour after what is printed on the reservation so you end up 20 minutes early that is TRUE vacation math.
• If you start the boat tour with a rainbow and end the boat tour with a rainbow, surely that means your car will not have been towed from the cemetery parking lot where you left it, right?
• If you sit at the front of the boat and go really fast, your eyelids FEEL like they should undo some of what gravity has done to them over the years, but it really doesn’t.
• Apparently pelicans can’t blink so they dive into salt water and can’t close their eyes so they eventually go blind and crazy. I feel like there is a metaphor there that I do not appreciate.
• The benefit of being mostly oblivious is that when you go around the path in the complete opposite way you are supposed to, you don’t actually notice anyone judgementally looking your way.
• International travel is supposed to broaden your horizons. I feel my greatest takeaway is that the United States does ice cream very wrong indeed.

2025 looks to be a year full of very large things, most of which I can do nothing about. So I am concentrating on the little things. My new goal is to try to quit wasting my time on things that just aren’t working. I love this quote, and am trying to take it to heart.

To start that off I have painted over several in process canvases to start fresh. For example, I started with this, which REALLY wasn’t working:

and turned it into this, which I simply didn’t like and made me exhausted each ime I went to work on it:

and then it mutated into this:

It’s inspired by my trip to San Diego which was five? years ago now? and doesn’t seem like it has anything to do with the Caribbean, except it sorta does. Our resident extrovert was going directly there after the vacation was over and I got to thinking about my trip and wandered through images and realized I took a LOT of photos of things through branches. Apparently I really like how everything looks with twisty, dark lines over everything. Who knew? And they seemed fun and this was the result. I am hoping it is the start of a year of only doing art that is fun and that I want to do – no commissions, no special requests, no forcing myself through things that aren’t making me happy. There is too much of that in life as it is, and that’s not what my art is for. So! Maybe that means it will take me less than five years to get around to doing art about THIS trip.  😉

In the meantime, here is a sunset. Because, pretty.

Also, in the six month break since I have posted, they have COMPLETELY CHANGED the entire format of how to enter a blog post. It’s now much more difficult to post, so if this totally fails to work, I am blaming it on the interwebz.