Monday Monday

​All right, I’m finally getting moving. We’re about to run to Grocery Depot to grab a few things for dinner tonight, and Gary wants to run downtown and get his oil changed. Our family group chat has been absolutely hilarious this morning. We’ve basically been laying around with our phones dinging nonstop, cutting up with all of Gary’s family, and somehow hours disappeared. 😂 Everybody finally had to go to work and do their thing, so I guess that means it’s time for us to get up and do ours too. I genuinely had no idea it was already 11:00. Actually, never mind. It’s almost noon. 😂

I’m going to work on Emily’s family portraits today, which I’ve been dreading for absolutely no good reason other than I know it’s going to be a big undertaking. But I’ve got to do it, so today is the day. I’m also going to try to make time for today’s Inktober prompt, although this is probably my least favorite one so far.

The word is SMACK.

And that is exactly why I’m struggling with it. 😂 There are only so many directions my brain goes with that word. Somebody getting smacked on the butt. A kiss. Smacking a fly. That’s about all I’ve got. I have plenty of ideas that would technically work, but most of them are way more involved than I want an Inktober piece to be. I do not want to spend eight hours on a drawing just because I’m determined to force one prompt to happen. I have actual things to do.

Most of the time, when I get stuck on something like this, I fall back on one of my little go-to things. I’ve always liked drawing women and working random things into their hair. I don’t know why. I’ve been doing it forever. If you go back through my artwork from five years ago, you’ll see it there too. When my brain is stuck, I can usually come up with a cute character and figure out some way to work the subject into her hair, and somehow that gets me moving again.

That’s exactly what happened with the cactus prompt yesterday. I had actually drawn a regular cactus first, and it was cute, but it just felt so generic. So I thought, fine. Cactus hair it is. 😂 That felt much more like me.

But SMACK? I cannot figure out how to put “smack” in somebody’s hair. LOL.

So I’m either going to skip it completely, or I’m going to keep it really simple. Maybe a girl with big lips and the word SMACK in those old comic-book-style letters. Or maybe a fly getting hit with a flyswatter with a giant SMACK across the page. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.

And really, if it’s fun and I can knock it out without investing half my day into it, I’ll do it. If not, I won’t. I mean, come on. It’s Inktober. It’s really not that serious. 😂 I do have most of the rest of the month planned out, though, so I’m not too worried about it. There are still a couple of prompts I’m not crazy about, but something usually pops into my head at the last minute. At this point I know what my little go-to things are and what works with my style, so I’ll just keep working around that.

I’ve been trying to post my Inktober piece here every day, so if one day you don’t see one… that means I just didn’t do it. 😂

We’ll see what happens. I have a lot of other stuff to do today too, including getting the rest of our Halloween decorations out in the rain. Perfect timing. For dinner tonight, though, we’re making one of our favorite things: rice paper wraps! You know those clear Asian rice paper wrappers that you dip in water and they soften up? Normally people put shrimp, slaw, lettuce, vegetables, and things like that inside them and eat them cold. We do not do that. 

We dip them in water, fill them with taco meat, cheese, and refried beans, wrap them up, and then air fry them until they get crispy. SO GOOD. They have way fewer calories than a regular tortilla, and it’s almost like eating a crispy cheesy beef-and-bean burrito. They are kind of a pain in the butt to make because you have to soften and wrap every single one individually, and then arranging them in the air fryer without everything sticking together becomes its own little project. I might actually try putting them in the oven tonight and see how that goes. Last time I made them, Harper really liked them too, so I’m looking forward to dinner.

We just have to go buy the rice paper wraps first. Anyway, that’s the plan over here. Y’all enjoy this nasty rainy day because it looks like it has officially moved in for the week around here. 😂