Dysmorphia💛🤍💜🖤

I’m watching F1 practice for the Australian GP, first race weekend of the 2026 season. It’s kind of soothing, like all these cars with their humming noises and new livery are returning migratory birds after a long winter, with familiar calls and bright breeding plumage.

My experiment with learning Japanese (still going) has made me decide to start learning a little Spanish. Today I ordered my pan dulce in Spanish and apparently did well enough that the lady at the shop just kept on. So I need to learn a little more so I can decline more politely if eg offered coffee. It’s easy to understand shop Spanish. Lots of context, lots of cognates, and 20 years in San Francisco hand me a lot of clues. But what to _say_ is another thing.

I pulled some of my recent watercolor abstractions into a blog post. #watercolor

https://rinsemiddlebliss.com/posts/2026-02-27-abstracted/

One of these days I’m going to paint the croissant, too, I kept thinking. Today was that day. I deliberately went a bit loose and interpretive rather than trying to get the contours perfectly. Croissants are hard to paint but fun. Hard not to eat them before the painting is done. #watercolor

https://rinsemiddlebliss.com/posts/2026-02-27-abstracted/

BART is down due to a system issue. No trains. No ETA. Just got turned away from 24th and Mission at 8:35 am #sfba #sfbayarea #SanFrancisco #oakland

I looked around for something interesting to paint and found this overgrown garlic and complicated ginger and then I needed something to fill in found a shallot I forgot about. Turns out garlic is really hard to paint! Ginger is tricky, too. But that shallot I’m super happy with. Next time I might try just onions in a bowl. #watercolor

I was thinking about Georgia O'Keeffe and her huge super closeups of flowers so decided to paint one of my tiny succulent about three times its size. #watercolor

In 4 minutes I’m going to have to disappoint the cat by getting up to join a meeting.

Shinjuku really likes sitting inside this oversized plastic bag on top of my suitcase. I put it away when I’m not nearby because it doesn’t seem safe unattended. I wonder what I could get for her that would be safe and she’d like as much. She has a soft cat house that she never uses. Something about the tight fit but maybe also the crinkle that she likes? #CatsOfMastodon #CatAdvice #cats

I had a stressful week but this evening my cat let me pick her up peacefully for the first time. I’ve not tried in a year because she didn’t like it, but this time I needed to redirect her from an object on the desk, and I picked her up by the solid part of her chest and then tucked her against me like a little baby cradled on her back and she purred as I petted her little head. I gently let her back on the ground after a minute or less, and she calmly walked to one of her hangouts. I think it may be possible she doesn’t mind being picked up or held after all, just not from the ground. This is the nicest thing that’s happened all day. Besides the sun, of course.