Yep. It snowed again. I am the April Fool. To think I was hoping that this was the end. The End of the snow, but instead, the spring promise on Saturday was just that, a promise. No commitment. Just a teensie bit of hope. And the idealist in me took wing, filling my heart with the just maybe...and now we are back into it. Hopefully, the apple trees/buds and the same with our glorious cherries will not be as romantic as I am. But weather shouldn't be the beginning and end of inspiration. It can be the prod, and I am feeling that tingle that maybe a new something is going to burst and I will be back in the picture making business again.

A girl can hope.

It is also really good to have our Saturday deadline behind us so that we can look forward to spring and change leaving the darker days of this winter behind us.

As you can see, there are new things afoot with this blog. I have migrated my blog, recipes, about Q and other things to the upgraded Squarespace 6 which has other bells and whistles that allow one to have a magnificent shopping page ( to come with the gemeralds, cards, and prints). The only thing I am struggling with (right now) is the gallery feature with thumbnails so I can bring Q.Cassetti.com over to this page as well as Luckystone Partners.com and have all of me under one web roof. I am plodding through learning this new tool (sans XML, HTML code) so it will take a bit of time, but I have patience and love SS...so it should work out.

I am taking over picnic baskets to Diane at Sundrees. We are working on a fun project to sell vintage baskets and then all the fun stuff to go inside as part of the Summer/ Bridal merch offering. I bought a bunch of baskets (Hawkeye and Redmon)--each different with some having pie racks, some having flatware attachments, a few green, a pink one, a tan one, a caramel one. I am in rapture over this beauties. There is an idea here.

Sketch v.1 Zydeco Poster, Q. Cassetti, 2010Zydeco derives from Les Haricots Verts (green beans/snap beans). I am working on a poster for the Zydeco Trail Riders event at the Rongo for the week of Grassroots. So, I am making a poster using beans, their swirly vines and heart shaped leaves, a pair of dancing boots ( one wears cowboy boots on the actual Zydeco Trail Rides)… and make it a love button by using a heart shape to hold the whole thing. Yes, there might be a bee or two. The reference is the BooZoo…who put out a CD called Zydeco Trail Ride…and BooZoo really personifies Zydeco as does Buckwheat Zydeco with his rhinestone embellished huge accordian. This is the prelim sketch. I am redrawing this to fit the format better…and take advantage of using my friends the vectors to do some of the woodcutty heavy lifting. I like what humor the beans have…and want to continue that. The Scroll holds the word Zydeco. And the feet in the boots need to be longer…

I am chipping away at putting the Insiders information on a tab here on the Rongovian Academy of Fine Arts. You will see Inside Ithaca on the top right. Its been work to move the copy from the liveliness of the interchange of Facebook to a more staid, but more usable webpage. We will see. This is looking a bit like a project. Like the zoneball I am, I indiscriminately what I thought was the Ithaca page and wiped out a bunch on the rest of the site. Dope. Dopey. It has pointed up new nice tools that Squarespace has made to bring social networking easy to flow to a blog etc. Cool.

Work continues apace. Lots of projects that are tangled webs of “we don’t know what we want and don’t have any ideas of what we are doing” and I tentatively step into this twisted route to try and figure it out by finding out all the things that are “wrong”. Its wild.

Kitty signed up for her dorm room today (substance free) with a lot of questions and promises to keep the environment substance free. She is committed to this…and it will give her a safe haven if all the students honor the code. Alex is running track even now (almost 8 p.m.). Rob is off at a meeting about the new bandstand to be built at the Tburg Farmers Market during Grassroots. Dinner will be late.

The rainy day has blossomed into blue sky perfection on the plateau.