I just got home from a 10 day, much needed family vacation. It’s been GO GO GO here for months, because my work didn’t slow down when Covid hit, it kind of ratcheted up a couple notches. Plus having all the kids home ALL DAY made things a bit harder. Deadlines don’t care.

Every summer we go stay with my wife’s grandma in a sleepy little town on Long Island. It’s not a flashy vacation, there’s no itinerary, no zip lines, no dolphin swimming, no nice restaurants, and no helicopter rides over volcanoes.

We watch sail boats go by as the tide rolls in and out. We try to outdo each other’s crazy dives off the dock. There’s lots of reading, and napping. Going to town to get ice cream is an event. We play memory, rummicube, and farkle. The most exciting thing on this trip was that a dogfish washed ashore and we debated whether it was a shark or not.

It’s juuust right.

For most of the vacation I didn’t even crack open my sketchbook. I did some reading, I did a bunch of staring out the window. At night I watched movies with my kids. One of my favorite things to do on vacation is write postcards from wherever I’m at and mail them to unsuspecting friends. I did a bunch of those.

I think I really needed this vacation, because I just felt burned out.

Drew this box bird thing up there on my flight home.

This was one of those “just let the pencil guide your way” kind of a drawing. There’s no backstory here, no reason for it other than I hadn’t drawn much for 10 days and I felt like I should probably get warmed up for re-entry.

I did two other drawings towards the end of our stay at Grandma’s: