Hi All You Beauty-Beings!
It's been such a long time, but I finally got a chance to sit down and read through the last few pages of this thread this morning and get caught up! I wish I could write in here more often, but as a number of you may remember, I seem to have a hard time just writing short posts

-- nearly every post turns into a novel!

Still working on the idea of writing shorter, quicker but more frequent posts/emails, etc., which would make it much easier for me to stay in much better touch with more people more often!
I just finished an 8-week online/phone workshop with the author/artist SARK (Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy) (
http://planetsark.com), who many of you have probably heard of. I've been a big fan of hers for years, and have almost all of her books, which are almost all hand-written in rainbow colors rather than in a typewritten font, and combined with her colorful hand-drawn artwork, making them such a delight to look at and read!

The class was on how to live your creative dreams, so I took it in order to get a little boost and some structure for working towards the dream of truly making a living from art. It involved a lot of journaling questions and soul-searching, articulating your dream, identifying the obstacles and beliefs that are standing in the way of truly living it, maintaining work/life balance and good self-care concurrently with living your dream, creating a support system for yourself, and all sorts of really helpful things, from a wonderful woman who's become quite wise and successful over the years at everything she's teaching. And now she's offered such a great discount for re-taking the course a second time that I'm going to take it again starting in September, since there was so much to absorb that it's hard to do it all in just one session anyway!
In the meantime, I got so busy sitting in coffee shops with my journal for at least a couple of hours a day exploring all these more "foundational" soul-searching questions in the class that, paradoxically, I slowed my art production way down!

So, now that there's a break in the action, I'm trying to get back up to speed on my art again and integrate what I've learned while continuing to actually get art done. There have been lots of detours on this path, but each one seems to be for a good reason, often resulting in me going back and getting some of the more foundational elements right before proceeding too far.
Pet, you had mentioned several pages back that you'd like to see my art on Facebook. I did run across both you and
Gypsie Deb on Facebook several weeks ago, when I was still really new to, and timid about, Facebook, so I didn't send anyone a friend request at the time, but now that I'm a bit more used to it, and am starting to get in the habit of actually posting my art there, and have been in the process lately of adding some friends I made at the SARK workshop too, I'll go look you up again! And I'll try to also find some of the rest of you who have mentioned that you're on Facebook (
Nicola,
Kenge) as well!
Sandy, well, it may be a little late for your basil plants at this point, but here's the basil lemonade recipe you asked for months ago!

Keep in mind that this recipe is intended for a really heavy-duty blender -- not sure how it'll work in other blenders (I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have worked too well in some of the other blenders we've had in the past!

) If it didn't work, I'm thinking you might be able to just used fresh-squeezed lemon juice instead of the whole lemon, and maybe brew some really strong tea from the basil leaves, refrigerate the tea, then mix it in with the lemonade part to get a similar taste?
3 C (720 ml) water
1 1/2 lemons, peeled, halved, seeded
1/4 C sugar or sweetener of choice
1/2 C fresh basil leaves
1 C ice cubes
Place all ingredients into blender in the order listed and secure lid. Turn machine on and quickly increase speed from lowest to highest. Blend for 1 minute or until desired consistency is reached.
Ron and I are following a new eating plan now, instead of the nearly-all-vegetarian, almost-no-fat one we were following for at least a year or two (then began drifting away from). This one combines good-quality animal protein from organic (as much as possible, anyway), free-range, grass-fed sources, eggs, organic minimally-processed full-fat dairy products and various nuts and oils in small amounts, organic fruits and vegetables, and small amounts of complex whole grains, sort of like the traditional notion of a "balanced diet" (but no processed foods, gluten, baked goods, or refined sugars), along with high-quality vitamins and probiotics. We have 3 meals and 2 snacks a day, and each meal is balanced to be approximately 40% carbohydrates, 30% fat, and 30% protein ("40-30-30," a ratio followed in other plans we've tried, but this one has seemed much friendlier and easier to follow, with actually delicious recipes, fortunately!).
Even though we'd been trying to take the mostly vegetarian approach for a few years, we’ve both noticed that we do actually feel better when we eat at least some animal protein, and it’s a lot easier not to miss the baked goods when you can have meal additions like small amounts of super tasty real-cream-based sauces of the sort that we’d previously not been allowing ourselves. And this plan's working better for Ron on his ongoing weight-loss efforts than any of the ones we've tried so far, mostly because it doesn't feel like nearly as much deprivation! We took a couple days off of it for his birthday a week or so ago, but found it really easy to get back on track again (actually, we were
glad to get back on track, after realizing how much better we felt
on the diet!

). I'll admit, I do still often have a small chai tea with whipped cream at the coffee shop in the afternoons, and small squares of dark chocolate here and there

-- I've found that if I keep a bar of 88% dark chocolate around, it's strong-enough tasting that I only want to eat a really small amount of it at once

, so that works out pretty well!
Well, okay, I see that this post is now already to at least "novella" stage

(though after such a long absence, perhaps it can hardly be helped, at least not by me!

) I'd best get going for now before I go on too much longer!

Lots of love to you all!
- Aqua Deb