Back From Bead Expo

I woke up this morning and found this peahen patrolling our neighborhood. In the picture, she is right under my studio window, beside my house! Portland has quite a few wild peacocks, as it turns out, another reason I love it here. My husband and I, thinking she might belong to someone nearby, went out to try to catch her, but she was way smarter that us, so is still at large in North Portland. I guess they are really just giant chickens, but so beautiful!

Bead Expo, put on by Interweave Press, was here from last Thursday until Sunday, and I was in day-long classes for the entire event. I'm so tired now, but also very, very inspired. All the classes turned out to be excellently taught and very useful. I did my best to take classes that would make me stretch out of my comfort zone and try new and different things, and that might even be a little intimidating or scary. This was an excellent decision! I discovered all sorts of things that I might not have learned if I had just "played it safe," and I will actually use a lot of what I learned instead of thinking, "Oh, that was fun!" but never really doing much with the information. I'm thinking that it would do me a lot of good to approach other aspects of life in this same way, too: stretch out and learn something. I've always felt that, like a shark has to keep moving through the water or die, we have to keep learning and growing or we'll die, too.