Time To Relax

For our prompt of “Harvest” today, I made a little sketch of two little harvest mice taking a break in a sunflower. I’ve been spending my Saturday as I always do, which means I’ve been relaxing all day long. Well, I took a break from that to watch videos of harvest mice running around before drawing and painting them. They’re so cute and so tiny! I’ve no idea why, but anything in miniature always makes me smile. Seeing these little mice bounce around on blades of wheat was particularly entertaining. They seemed to be having a blast, performing incredible gymnastics with their long tails wrapping around things with such skill. I wondered what it might be like to have such agility. I’m not quite so athletically coordinated. At any rate, It would be rather wild to shrink down to the size of one and see the world from a different view. Chilling in a sunflower sounds like a lovely way to spend the day indeed!

Though my Saturdays are quite fun, I always feel like I’ve managed to do nothing much at all. And then, I sometimes feel a touch of guilt that I wasn’t a bit more productive. Today, however, I did do one domestic thing, which felt rather nice. Our master bath has a steam shower that came with the house and that we’ve never really wanted or ever used. Recently it acquired a mind of its own and started coming on by itself in the middle of the night. Since it’s not something we use, the sound was perfectly terrifying. We turned it off again, but it didn’t seem to get the message and would still come on sporadically. Our first step was to simply turn off the water valve which seemed to solve things for awhile. Then the generator started grumbling on its own and so we thought we’d find the fuse and turn it off. Unfortunately, nothing was labeled, and we couldn’t find which one it was easily. So, I had Philippe call me from upstairs while I tried all of the fuses so he could tell me if anything happened. The last one I tried proved successful and we both started cheering.

The pesky steam shower was finally laid to rest. It’s perfectly ridiculous, of course, to get excited about something this stupidly simple to solve. But, Philippe and I are not what you’d call domestic mavens and each little house problem is a complete confusion to us. We thought about learning more things so we could do them ourselves, but then remembered that we absolutely don’t like doing any of those things and quickly gave up. So, today was a brief and silly celebration of our success, while completely ignoring our utter ineptness. It was lovely. Then we went back to our sunflower world of happy things and continued our day without being interrupted by possessed appliances. We had a lovely lunch consisting of delicious Mexican food and watched an old episode of Murder, She Wrote. It was one of the more exciting ones where there’s more than one culprit and crime. Jessica Fletcher solved it all as usual with her amazing deductions. Yes, it was a silly and, to some, a perfectly dull day. But to the two of us, it was just a beautiful time to relax.

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About the Doodlewash Da Vinci Paint Co.: Yellow Ochre, Hansa Yellow Medium, Opus (Vivid Pink), Quinacridone Red, Cobalt Turquoise, Ultramarine (Green Shade), and Terra Cotta. Lamy Al-Star Safari Fountain Pen with black ink in an A5 Hahnemühle Watercolour Book. Want to purchase a print of this doodlewash? Click here!

Charlie O'Shields

Creator of Doodlewash, founder of World Watercolor Month (July), World Watercolor Group, and host of the Sketching Stuff Podcast. Sharing watercolor illustrations and stories while proudly featuring talented artists from all over the world!

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