My daughter (yelling): Dad, can you get me some water?

Me (down the hall): You’re sitting in a bathtub. Next to a sink. There are two cups beside the sink.

My daughter: …

Me: …

My daughter: So can you get me some water? (groannn) I’m SO thirsty.

I'm drawing the bat house in my back yard, an illustration for a new essay. This is a timelapse of the second stage — painting the house itself, using a mixture of gouache and ink. Later, I'll draw the other elements — the trees, sky, etc. — and then composite it all together to make a finished scene.

I re-read Pride and Prejudice(Note: Or, to be exact, I listened to an excellent audio edition read by Kate Beckinsale, and also reread my favorite bits in my print copy.)last week. I find myself drawn back to that story every few years, and every time my experience is a little different.

It’s become one of my favorite books. The story seems deliberately ‘small’ — tightly focused and deceptively simple — which is one of the things I love about it. It struck me, on this last read-through, that the story takes place almost entirely inside Elizabeth Bennet’s head. It’s written in a close third-person perspective, so that we see everything from her point of view. And so much of Elizabeth’s journey, I realized, is invisible to everyone around her.

Sometimes it's the small victories. When I'm annotating a book(Note: Becky Chambers' fantastic A Prayer for the Crown-Shy.)with a pen(Note: A Nahvalur Original Plus, a recent find that I'm liking so far, especially with the Pilot Iroshizuku Syo-Ro (turquoise) ink it's filled with here.)that matches its cover, I can bask in the feeling (or at least the pleasant illusion) that the various parts of my life are working together.

The New York Times ran a nice profile of Sean Paul that took me straight back to 2002.

The article was fascinating. While Sean Paul’s music made up a decent chunk of the soundtrack of my college days, I wasn’t so familiar with his career. I didn’t realize he was so prolific, or that early classics like Get Busy were based on an Indian beat called the Diwali riddim.

I found myself watching a bunch of early-oughts music videos, thanks to YouTube’s rabbit-hole suggestions, and it stirred up a whole brew of complicated feelings.

I finally got around to varnishing a few of my larger paintings.

I’ve been putting it off, I think, because varnishing is pretty scary for me. I’ve gotten it wrong before and ruined paintings.

It takes me forever to finish large paintings. By the time I’ve reached the varnishing stage, I might have years of work invested in a particular piece, which I really don’t want to lose because of, say, expired solvent or the wrong mixture. Waking up to discover your picture has become a tacky, discolored mess is the absolute worst.

Sometimes one good blog leads to another.

Robin Rendle wrote a nice post about another blog he discovered called brr. It’s about day-to-day life at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, written by an engineer there. I’m especially fascinated by the posts on signs and frost. Those little details really paint a picture of what the place must feel like to live and work in.

Cheers to Robin; his blog is an old favorite, a great place to talk a walk around the South Pole, learn new writing tools, or admire shadows.

I’m working on another illustration of my bat house for a new essay. I plan to finish it in gouache and ink, but first I did some pencils to try to figure out the composition. As you can see in the timelapse above, I ended up wrestling a lot with the layout and perspective.

Every year, my in-laws make a pilgrimage to Ocean City, Maryland(Note: Or just ‘The Ocean’, as Baltimore folks call it.).

I’m not much of a beach person, really, but I appreciate the change of scenery each summer. And, Lord knows, the ocean breeze is a welcome break from the stagnant, oppressive heat we get at home in July.

On the morning after we arrived, I stepped out for a walk. I followed my usual route from our rented house to the inlet piers on the southern tip of the island, then north along the beach on the east side. I figured I’d hike up that side awhile and, whenever I ran out of steam, I’d take a left and walk back along the bay shore on the west side. It’s a nice loop with views of water in both directions.