Tag: adult coloring

Fun Ahead!

I figured out a way to get to the Holidailies prompts: Just go to one of my entries from last year where I linked to a question and once on the prompt site, hit “reload.”

Today’s prompt asks “What have you been most looking forward to this holiday season?”

As usual, I’m looking forward to socializing. First there is the now-annual trip to see the state trees with a buddy. Then there’s the office party, which will be a three-hour cruise on the Potomac River.

Go on. Sing it. You know you wanna.

“A THREE-HOUR TOUR…”

Glad that’s out of your system.

A picture of the actor Bob Denver portraying Gilligan on Gilligan's Island.

I’m hoping to meet a few friends for brunch as well, do a couple of trivia nights, and top it all off with seeing John Oliver at the Kennedy Center on New Year’s Eve.

But I’m also looking forward to a whole week off. Usually I wait until after New Year’s to take a week off as a way of taking one for the team at work because most of my team members have kids. This year I’m taking the week of December 30 off. If I don’t take the time off, come the first paycheck of January I’ll have 240 hours of vacation time there and it will stop accruing.

OH, HELL NAW. Ya girl here has NEVER maxed out on vacation in her 36-year career. I prefer to keep it hovering around four weeks–not close to maxing out but enough that if I ever decide to chuck it all and live in a yurt, I have a whole month of income coming to me. If I hadn’t had to cancel my two-week trip to Portugal earlier this year on account of my cardiac rehab, I wouldn’t be close to maxing out, but I really should have taken at least another week off between March and now. Shame on me, as I’m a big proponent of work-life balance. Also, to be perfectly blunt, once I’ve been in a job for more than a few years, if I don’t take a week off every four months or so, my writing starts to suck.

We can tell.

I heard that!

At any rate, I’m looking forward to relaxing for most of that week. No alarm clocks. Maybe a solo trip to the Smithsonian. Maybe lunch with a retired friend. But mostly a lot of goofing off.

What are you looking forward to this month?

Today’s snowflake. I had to turn the saturation way up or you wouldn’t be able to see the colors. Unfortunately, turning the saturation up also turned the cast of the light up and now it looks like the paper is 40 years old. Sorry about that.

A snowflake colored with glitter pens.

At Random

If you have a Christmas tree, does it have a random ornament? My tree does. I’m not sure when I got it—perhaps when I was married. I’m not sure exactly where I got it, either, although something tells me it was somewhere in the Pentagon City Mall. Years ago there used to be a shop called The Christmas Store there, so maybe I got it there. It was Christmas year round in that store, although they did sell ornaments commemorating other holidays. Or perhaps I got it at The Nature Company, which was later converted into a Discovery Channel Store, which later closed. It may have been part of a series of ornaments that fit a Nativity scene, but knowing me, I would have gotten any accompanying sheep, too, although nothing else having to do with the Nativity because that’s just never been my thing. So I really can’t tell you why I have this, only that I’m glad I do because it’s just so random in a tree filled with birds, Snoopy, snowmen, angels, and traditional round ornaments, and I like random things.

So here it is: Two dromedaries.

A Christmas ornament featuring two dromedaries.

Also, I don’t think I posted this anywhere last year but it has been sitting on my phone since December 12, 2022, so I’ll post it now. The image is from a Jade Summer coloring book called Intricate Patterns and I colored it using Tombow brush pens.

A mandala.

It took me something like eight hours spread out over three days, as it was the first time I used those brush pens–which also explains what a hot mess it is because Tombow brush pens are kind of big and I had no idea what I was doing or how to use them. I’m not an artist by a long shot.

In fact, I never expected them to be what they are. I had been using a set of no-name dual-tip brush/fine-point markers that I picked up at Barnes & Nobles in 2017 with a gift card from a former boss. I was new to using anything other than Prismacolor pencils and enjoyed using the no-name brand brush markers, which are about the size of a ball-point pen but thinner and more delicate, so when I saw the Tombow set of 96 on sale for half-off on Amazon, I grabbed it, thinking they might be similar. Well, they are a just a wee little bit bigger than the no-name brand. Just a tiny bit. Just a smidge.

Two brush pens, one larger than the other.

In fact, they’re 7.5 inches, which means no man will ever be able to lie to me about that.

And on that tacky note, I will now post the penultimate entry for this year’s Holidailies, heh.