Hello, I’m Back!!

Well, hello again! I’ve been on hiatus for a while, and I thought it was time to explain my absence. While I still enjoy writing and love to share what I’ve learned, hoping it will be helpful to someone (or at least entertaining), I’ve found a new “love”… art!

I actually started drawing years ago, painting wildflowers in a little sketchbook that I would pick on walks , just for myself, for fun. But my hubby said, flowers are boring… why don’t you paint something more interesting… like faces! Of course, I told him faces are hard (and they are!). But it was a challenge! My sister-in-law had been an art teacher for many years, though, and she steered me to a wonderful instruction book: The Big Book of Realistic Drawing Secrets by Carrie Stuart Parks. It is excellent and even includes a section on drawing faces, and I also bought her Secrets to Drawing Realistic Faces book. I soon discovered I love drawing faces! It’s the challenge of making the drawing look like the person, a little puzzle to figure out what line or shading is incorrect and making it look “off”.

These early drawings were all done in pencil (“graphite”), occasionally adding some colour with watercolour pencils, but I had difficulty making the colour even – most of the time the colour looked blotchy and streaked. I knew so little about watercolours that I didn’t realize you need special paper that’s made for watercolour! So I decided to try chalk pastels, thinking they would behave more like graphite. They did, but they were messy and didn’t travel well and, by then, we had started going away for the winter.

Then I learned that key piece of advice: watercolour needs to be used on watercolour paper! With the help of online courses and a few You Tube videos, I started to progress and I discovered I love it! Watercolour is my thing!! Suddenly I seemed to have no time for writing my blog, although I continued to read and make note of interesting subjects to write about – I just never made the time to write them. I was addicted!

I drew or painted family and friends, gave them as gifts – wedding gifts, Christmas gifts, even hostess gifts sometimes (invite us to dinner, get a painting as a thank you!!) I started wanting to paint places that we’d visited, and that drew me into painting landscapes and buildings. I still love to look through those paintings because of all the memories they hold.

In January 2025 I decided to try painting outdoors, “en plein air”. It’s so much fun! And creating tiny paint kits that had everything I needed became a sideline hobby (I have quite a few… too many really!) Later in 2025, I heard about an art sale being held at the nursing home here in Cap-Pele. By this point I had so much art created that I didn’t know what to do with it all. I was stuffing it into presentation books to store on a shelf as the walls of my art room/sun room were completely covered with my art, plus there was a lot more scattered throughout the house. So I signed up for that show (a great success!) and 3 more over the summer and fall.

My blog started as a way to reach out to women going through the menopause change – my earliest posts are all about hormones and, if that topic interests you, just scroll back in my archives on this site to 2016 and you’ll find what I wrote. Very little has changed since then, except that taking hormone supplements is believed to be safer than what was suggested when the Womens’ Health Initiative Study was stopped early in the early 2000’s. My opinion has always been that hormones that are the same as what our bodies make, in similar amounts, must be safe. They are what we ended up with through evolution, survival of the fittest. It’s synthetic hormones, that are different and therefore have different actions in some parts of the body, that are more likely to create problems and side effects. And, just like too little of our own hormones leave us with unpleasant effects, too much isn’t good either. The safest and most effective route is always to replace only what hormones are missing with the same hormones in a normal “physiological” amount. OK… I’ll get off my soap box now!!

So, fast forward to today… I feel like many of you are good friends who have followed me during my health journey, sharing what I’ve learned, learning from my experiences, passions, and sometimes rants! And, since this blog has been going for 10 years, like me, most of you are well past the menopausal change. I still read about health issues, for both men and women. I want to stay healthy and active and I’m sure you do to. So, I’m thinking I could and should be writing about issues we older gals (and guys) face.

But I feel like I want to share my art journey with you too, although it seems off-topic from my previous writing. I strongly believe doing art is good for your health, giving a purpose in life, an excuse to continue learning and advancing skills, and a passion that can be shared with others. And viewing art is good for your mental health too – it can transport you to another place and time, capture memories, create positive emotions and so much more! The paintings that sell fastest here in Cap-Pele are the ones I’ve done of the beach – people buy them to take the memories of a wonderful vacation or walk on the beach home with them to view whenever they want to feel those feelings again, to feel calmer and better.

So, I’m proposing a new blog, one that’s aimed at supporting physical and mental health — a chat about current health issues and disease prevention, but also sprinkled with some art for you all to enjoy… sharing my learning and my passions in a weekly or bi-weekly chat. Does that interest you? I hope so!

I’ve added a Gallery page to my website, if you’d like to see some of my work. Just go to the menu on the top right to navigate there. I’ll apologize in advance… some paintings have been sold already. I still need to figure out how to mark items as sold!

Every painting has a story and I hope that some of my art stories will resonate with you. I haven’t figured out how to attach explanations of the where and why behind each painting yet either, but I’ll learn! Let me know in the comments below or by direct message if you’re interested in this new format… and which paintings are your favourites!!

PS: The painting above in the center is my latest — just finished yesterday. It’s a celebration of the return of the Blue Herons… just saw my first of the season!