Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

The final days of August here in Maine have been so beautiful - warm and sunny and blue and gold. I can't seem to get enough of them. I've been adjusting to working at home, the easy way: by working for a while, then running outside and sitting in the sun to read for an hour (have returned to P.G. Wodehouse after my opening salvo toward the works of Conrad), then working some more, then running back outside to sit in the sun with my lunch, then etc. etc. Makes the work, such as it is, go easier. My work at the moment includes photographing all of my paintings from the last several years, then making a list of titles, dates, sizes, then editing the photos for color and brightness (to match the original as closely as I can), and finally choosing which ones are destined for my website-to-be. My friend Joanna is creating it for me, and she even lent me her superfancy digital camera for a few weeks, the sweetie. We hope the site will be up by the end of September, but with days like these ones lately, it's hard to sit inside in front of the little glowing screen and get anything actually accomplished.

Yet work must be done. And there are some big things looming. One of our fall projects around here involves beginning the renovation/transformation of our attic into my painting studio. We need insulation, a real floor, outlets and such. And there's a rotten old dormer window that needs to be enlarged and replaced, so we can see more of this view:

That's moonrise sometime last month, at sunset. The body of water is the point where the Penobscot River becomes Penobscot Bay, the Gulf of Maine, the Atlantic Ocean. We're often fogged in, and I love it, it reminds me of where I grew up. In the late afternoon the air would change and the fog would come in, often when the tide turned.

The attic will be a great studio, once it's finished - in a year or so, depending on finances. Until then, I'm tripping over paintings, boxes of books, empty bookcases with no more free walls to put them on, and everything else from the bookshop - desk, tables, chairs, boxes of files and paperwork, bookends, printing presses, you name it. Most of it's in the living room, with the doors firmly shut. It's a big mess, but I refuse to be discouraged. Considering that in late July I sold a terrific book, and in early August I sold a few paintings, the proceeds of which, combined, were greater than my total income over the previous six months, I'm not doing badly at all. In fact, those sales will pay for the first half of the attic renovation. And then some. But why am I sitting here talking about money? I've got to get back outside before the afternoon's over.