Summers end, painting, and books

I think we’re far enough into September that I won’t jinx myself by saying: summer here wasn’t bad. From what I hear, there’s other parts of Japan and Europe had a rough time this year. But my area was for some reason not too bad. It wasn’t without some miserable days, but it felt less painful than the recent years. I am excited for having energy again. Every fall we realize just how much the hot weather just melts away our energy. And once the weather calms down, we’re able to do more than one thing in a day. I am excited for some good walks. With the milder weather, we ventured to some local festivals. Or at least we payed attention to when they were and remembered this time. One was a mikoshi festival, where people were carrying mikoshi from every neighborhood in the area. We tried to look for our neighborhoods, but it was already parked off to the side when we arrived. Must have finished up much earlier than we arrived to the festival. The other festival with tons of people doing dances. It was rather hot that day. It must’ve been very hard to perform that day. I loved this festival. It was a lot of fun and neat to watch the performers. At some point I want to do a painting or two from some photos I took from that. I took a bunch of photos and have been doing gesture drawings from them.

Still enjoying the painting class every week. It’s already getting dark at around 6pm now. So now it’s already dark before I start my painting class. There was a few weeks where sunset was right around when class started at 7 and I got some very nice sunset views on my way in. This last month I painted a small mejiro painting and that’s going to be in a little art exhibit in the gallery for the school. Our plan for this afternoon is to walk over to see that.

We’ve been reading a lot more lately. More evenings where we’ll just sit in the living room and just read for a bit. S has a stack of books that she’s working through in one room, and has another stack of books she’s reading at her desk. She’ll sit down, read a bit of one book. Pack it full of those small sticky notes to mark something she finds something interesting, and then swap to the next book. She’s atleast aware of her tsundoku and is working on it. I’m working through my first Hemingway, which is a whiplash of a read from Beowulf¹. Which is more like watching fish in a tank than I expected. I don’t know what to expect, I didn’t really look up much about it and do not really know much about Hemingway beyond that he tended to write in a “simple” way. This year is looking to be my best year of reading so far? It’s not an impressive amount, but it’s an improvement. I hope to keep up the momentum. Being more aware to make the time to have those quiet reading evenings together helps.