I have a confession to make. I’m a pesto snob. I spent years sampling store-bought varieties, disappointed with everything in a jar, and nearly all of the fresher, refrigerated ones. While studying abroad in Paris, I lived on yogurt, baguettes, and–yes–pesto. Watching a friend make pesto out of a packet nearly killed me.

You know that saying? About what to do if you want something done well? And don’t have a celebrated Italian chef locked away in your kitchen cupboard? Clearly, the answer was to find a good pesto recipe and obsessively refine it over the course of several months.

A few weeks ago, I quietly rolled out a new portfolio page at www.serenae.com/portfolio. It features a sliding content section, bold typography, elegant lightboxed images, and a gallery of my work organized by category, all with the same simple, sleek style as my blog page.

At the beginning of last week, I found myself with half of a delicious cantaloupe. Now, that may not seem like much of a problem to you. Eating cantaloupe is a pretty enjoyable activity, after all. But it just so happens that there’s one thing even better than than fresh cantaloupe on a sweltering summer day: icy cantaloupe sorbet!

I’m always on the lookout for new adaptations of lesser-known fairy tales, and just over a month ago I was lucky enough to find one practically on my doorstep, at the National Gallery of Art. De Vilde Svaner (The Wild Swans) is one of Hans Christian Andersen’s most beautiful stories, and I had high expectations.

The more I read about this production, an hour-long Danish production with art design created by–no joke–Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, the more apprehensive I became. A film with découpage backdrops and actors greenscreened in? I just wasn’t convinced that they’d be able to pull it off.

And oh boy, was I wrong!

Took the tram to The Castro, explored, ate our traditional lunch at Orphan Andy’s, climbed the hill in Buena Vista Park, endured very windy weather, and watched a bizarre hilltop ceremony.

I spotted Waldo in Silver Spring, Maryland last weekend at the second annual Silver Spring Zombie Walk. Well, undead Waldo.

When I was in elementary school, I used to complain about stomach aches all the time to get out of math class. And when I say all the time, I mean all the time. The school nurse knew me. She could even recognize my footsteps and my knock. Anyway, being an extremely patient and sympathetic woman (perhaps she didn’t like math either), she always let me stay. I would hop up onto the spare cot with a Where’s Waldo book and spend the next half hour searching through the pages.

As well as setting a really dangerous precedent of two blog posts in one week, I’m also getting into the bad habit of posting a lot of images and very little text. I’ll try to get better about that, though I secretly believe that people are, in general, too lazy to read lot of text anyway.

As promised, here are my four most recent paintings. They’re actually finished, which is more than I can usually say! We’ll see about continuing this trend.

I’m going to save up for a couple of canvases so next time I don’t have to paint on paper.

We spent the sunniest day of the week outdoors, on the Lizard. Mid-morning, the high tide was crashing into Mullion Cove, where I climbed a hill and made friends with a pretty bug. After that, we hit up the Lizard Pasty Shop for “Ann’s famous Cornish pasties” and ate them overlooking the ocean. We arrived at Kynance Cove just in time for low tide. All of the cliffs at Kynance are made of beautiful green and red serpentine (lizardite). I geeked out a little over this, and got strange looks from my fellow beach-goers as I leaned close to the rock walls to examine green serpentine veins. It amazed me that people were running around and climbing on these rocks without even noticing how gorgeous they were.

So I finished writing the short story for my individual study last week, and decided to draw some accompanying illustrations.

It has recently come to my attention that, as a child, I may not have been exposed to the normal sort of things one expects at that age. Instead of watching cartoons, I’d beg my parents to let me see new nature programs on the Discovery Channel. I knew Chaplin before Carrey, watched more Fred and Ginger musicals than Disney movies, and had a strange fascination with Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” before I even understood all the words.