Hello Steemit, finally I am introducing myself.

Hello World—

I have had the hardest time trying to introduce myself. This is draft three, and I’m still not feeling it. I love writing about my interests, but writing about myself? No, not at all. I fit the description of a cancer quite nicely—I am a crab in my shell, and I like it here—do I really need to make space for anyone else? I am the sort of person that agrees to go to a party two months in advance (This looks fun!), then the day before has regret (You are practically a recluse, what were you thinking?), but I force myself to be true to my word and then have a great time. Because, most of the time, society is fun. So let’s do this.

I am a mother, artist-of-sorts, homesteading enthusiast, and writer.

Let me begin at “mother”, because it is a term that I feel describes the undercurrent of what drives me. I love nurturing things, and watching them grow. I always have, long before I had children. We are a homeschooling family, and have been tinkering in that arena for the past year or so. Teaching my children is by far my greatest passion, and also the most rewarding one.

I call myself an artist-of-sorts, because I’ve been tinkering around with that for some thirty years now. I have no schooling or accolades in that regard, just a drive to produce. My art is almost entirely of people. I adore many other things (in fact I’m not much for socializing, as previously stated), but people are the only subjects that keep me focused. As I paint or draw I want to know all about the character, whether it is real or invented. For me art is a bit like dreaming—it is a time for the subconscious to sift through problems, or just the day’s thoughts. I find whatever the theme of my life is at the moment gets projected onto what I am working on. I love that about art—each piece is a page of the subconscious diary.

Here is a quick self portrait from my sketchbook tonight:

I will throw the other titles I gave myself here into one quick paragraph. I am dabbling in some “survival gardening”, which I find especially fun in my native Florida, where I feel we have some unique challenges. We keep twelve feathered friends in the backyard, who lay us a lovely array of colored eggs. Lastly, I am a “writer”, which is a very broad term that I like. I am a writer of a blog just getting started, as well as various fiction things that I like to hoard away (my grandchildren will one day find them on my then antique laptop). And I am a writer of endless emails to family full of homeschooling tidbits, pictures of art, and my gardening successes and failures—all of which I can now bombard you lovely people with.

There, I’ve done it. I’ve extended one claw out of my shell. It was really quite easy, once getting started.