Okay, I’ll admit it, I’ve been a bit remiss[1] of late. Someone pointed out that I’ve not really blogged as such for a while merely posted a pretty picture or two with a couple of words of introduction. There are good reasons for this, okay, they may not be that good a reason, but they’re the best excuses I could come up with:-

• I’ve been busy.
• I stubbed my toe.
• Inspiration had left me.
• I could not type due to RSI.
• I was paid not to write one.

Some of the above are true, I’ll let you work out which ones, though I can point out no one sadly paid me not to write one
In truth I have been busy, I completed an online Apple App development course so I’m now qualified to develop Apps for the iPhone and iPad – maybe I should point out that the course was terrible, a monkey could have passed it – in fact a monkey could have presented the course better, the online tutorial videos were so bad the instructor regularly made mistakes or paused while he worked out what he was supposed to be doing. So while I could make a basic App at the end of the course it wasn’t an App you could realistically sell or use to promote yourself with. I’ve gone back to my usual technique for learning stuff, reading all I can on the subject and working it out for myself.
Other recent activities which kept me from writing a ‘real’ blog included designing a couple of websites, both proved to be interesting in different ways (one site needed an online store which is something I’d not worked on before, but is certainly an avenue I’ll follow up on another time). Finally the rest of my time has been taken up with photographs, painting, and of course sketching wizards hats

Watching Paint Dry…

Living in a rural location in the North of England with little heating to speak of in the house means watching paint dry can be a long drawn out process in winter. It gets to the point where you think twice about getting the watercolours out when there’s not much time to paint. This could be the reason I spent so much time recently painting digitally, in fact a project which I’d intended doing on paper with watercolours and ink ended up being completed on screen in Painter 12. Looking at the finished piece the digital approach was the right one for that piece anyway as it allowed for changes to be made that would have been impossible with watercolours. Still, I had the urge to paint something with real paint and when I saw a photograph online that a friend had taken I had to break out the watercolours and brushes, yes the house is to cold for the paints to dry in anything under an hour but it does give me plenty of time to watch the paint dry.

An etymological footnote[2]

[1] remiss (adj.) early 15c., “weak, dissolved,” from Latin remissus, pp. of remittere “slacken, abate, let go”. Meaning “characterized by lack of strictness” is attested from mid-15c.; that of “characterized by negligence” is from c.1500.

[2] footnote (n.) 1841, from foot (n.) + note (n.). So called from its original position at the foot of a page. Also sometimes formerly Bottom note[3]. As a verb, from 1864. Related: Footnoted; footnoting.

[3] bottom note see feortan