Drawn on the Cintiq. Photoshop 7.0 Peets coffee

Warm up. The deal with drawing sometimes is the blahs. Everyone gets it. I get it right around the holidays and stays with me till about spring. Winter depression? Hybernation? I have to swim upstream against my body's inclination to find a pile of leaves in a cave and sleep for a quarter. Thank goodness this year there are somethings that's sure fire to get me revving.

Like the mars rover making it all the way to Mars. That's just the little boy in me who wanted to be an astronaut when Life magazine featured a layout of the proposed Moon landing using wood mock-ups of the lander in glorious black and white. No metal trivet in the house would be safe from being conscripted into service (ours looked like it had landing struts) as my pawn in re-enacting a dreamed of actual landing. I remember that I was fit to be tied July 20, 1969 and had to run in and out of the house looking up at the sky and duck back in to stare at our twitchy Zenith squinting at the shadow of the lander for hours it seems--almost trying to tie the sky above to the televised event happening that very moment. Sigh.

The first picture sent from Mars by Spirit was a black and white expanse of usual desert. A lousy still from the surface of Mars. I know that I'm grateful and really giddy about the success but a little disappointed that even though technology had advanced to unimagined heights and scientists can stare back into the void and make out dust clouds between galaxies but here we are practically in our own back yard and we couldn't see a moving picture of that dry desert? Okay, I understand that there might be little point to it since there wouldn't be anything moving...but footage of a pan across that landscape at least? Sheesh. A lousy black and white still in the year 2004 versus moving footage of Neil Armstrong hopping down on the moon in 1969. Come on, guys.

Then there is Steve Jobs keynote address at Macworld. There are more accurate reports on what he unveiled today and so I won't go into it. But one thing that got me, aside from the iPod mini is Garage Band. Okay, maybe they should've done more name studies but between me and my son we were ready to shell out bucks and steel ourselves for interminable frustration with applications that will do what this new member of the iLife suite does with seeming relative ease. It turns your Mac into a digital recording studio. Okay, I won't get into it but here was Steve ,an admitted non-musician, and he demonstrates how even he can make music that sounds very professional with this thing. Man, I want one! Gimme! Gimme! And I feel a rather vicarious pride about seeing this address, being that we have an all Mac household (now, don't all of you PC hordes get in a huff, I didn't take Bill Gates' name in vain--just happy to hear that Apple is making stuff that people like me really want to use, 'kay? This is a no-frothing-at-the-mouth zone. Unless it's me).

So, that did it. I can draw today. I just drew this here image above of our friendly neighborhood girl of your dreams, Nina. I probably still have the blahs and I dont' really have time to make the soundtrack to my little short story reel even if I had Garage Band (still have trouble saying that) and Spirit won't be ambling over the Martian sands till next week (I better get moving footage then or else I'm burning my Major Matt Mason action figure)--but this will tide me over just fine.