Fall berries

Forgot the most important part! 🍽️

Chipotle-cardamom salmon with roasted carrots, blood oranges, garlicky tahini yogurt, dill, chives, pistachio. Bit of dressing with sesame oil, squeezed orange, sherry vinegar and maple syrup.

Fun fungi on the trail

En plein air at Vogel State Park

Neighborhood cat stops to sniff flowers

Good morning ☀️

Quick and dirty landscape The end of the street

Spinach and walnut dip with yogurt, garlic, and dried mint 🍽️ A very good push through the afternoon work slump snack

To know her is to love her: The most classic lip balm

I saw another magnificent heron on my walk this morning and I’m starting to piece together that they’re actually super common (not rare) You just have to go outside (not be curled up like a shrimp over your laptop) to see them

Painting every day means every day Even if sometimes the subject is something mundane and the work turns out lopsided 🍅

Time for the Q3 update! This past quarter was REALLY good for joy and progress toward personal goals Bonus: Cute dog portrait included inside www.melaniecrissey.com/blog/q3-2025/

One thing I learned about web hosting when I worked in that space: It's not very sticky. Extremely easy to switch providers on a whim. Point your repo somewhere else. It's online! There are SO many choices when you want to deploy. preview. ship. Thinking about this today for no reason!!

Today I asked an LLM to go pull a bunch of company logos from websites, convert all the .svgs to grayscale, and size them so they'd look nice next to one another in a logo bar It failed SPECTACULARLY so marketing designers AI isn't coming for your jobs

Bit off more than I could chew trying to paint a hydrangea today Walking away for now, will try this one again another day

Dinner tonight is chicken thighs braised with dates, caramelized lemons, and thyme 🍽️ Plus a big butter lettuce salad with pistachios, fresh lemon, chives, dill, grated garlic and way too much evoo

En plein air painting the Glover House in Marietta today Weather was perfect! But it was an added challenge keeping ants off my paper while I worked

Using up all the leftover green and olive paints on my enamel palette

Breaking in the rag paper journal

The recycled Mexican tumbler is my favorite water glass for the nightstand because it’s thick, smooth, and structurally sound Can’t have a crispy edged vessel next to the bed while I’m sleeping. What if I wake up and accidentally chomp down on the glass like Willy Wonka on a buttercup??

Got invited to an app that won't even let me hit their zero state dashboard without completing an entire COURSE in their "academy" Please design apps that don't require full-focus guided education to get started 🙏 If your SaaS needs a "University" you messed up

I think these are called globe amaranth? Painting little purple ball flowers over lunch break

Truly fun AI coding experience today → warp.dev held my hand through new dev environment setup → kilocode.ai helped me quickly understand a project and make changes in VS Code → GitHub Copilot caught redundant code, suggested cleanups on the PR Still got to tinker and use a few brain cells

Alien: Earth ep 8

Poke berries

First time I saw a startup running marketing operations slapped together with duct tape and elbow grease: dear god 😨 6th time seeing a startup running marketing operations slapped together with Slack emojis and a dream: honey, I'm home 🥰

Dinner tonight is fragrant khichadi with yogurt, cilantro, and aachar. 🍽️ The spicy pickled green mango is new to me but it reminds me of a lot of other things I love, like preserved lemons, green tomato chow chow, calabrian chiles or spicy kimchi. Bright, hot, velvety, delish!

Today I saw this large Lawrence Calcagno watercolor in a local gallery It’s the kind of thing that looks simple but requires skills and patience My attempts to mimic these clean lines were humbling, to say the least

Example of AI doing a good job: I accidentally borked my MX records for my custom email domain in Netlify DNS Exported all records > fed to ChatGPT as .csv It did a good job of explaining where I messed up and even caught a deprecated SPF 🤞 Fingers crossed it'll be fixed after it propagates!

Putting my tracing paper to good use, homemade Snoopy card for a birthday Watercolor and ink

Wearing an oversized sweatshirt on an afternoon walk 👟 in 80 degree weather ☀️ Because Fall isn’t a season, it’s a state of mind

About once per year Alan tolerates a selfie request, for documentation purposes Happy 12th anniversary! 💕💕

Longing for the beach

Georgia shrimp

Highlight of my day so far was 5 min. helping somebody debug a broken Mailchimp form Then we added some custom CSS for their embedded news archive together But when they asked me how to use webhooks to make a collection, I washed my hands of it “Sounds like a great question for your favorite LLM”

Cityscape practice from a photo reference

The novelty of an at-home “burrito bowl” 🍽️

Over a decade ago, I created my neighborhood on Nextdoor Now every few weeks I have to go in and vote on posts to keep or remove (spam, public shaming, fundraising, etc.) Most recent zinger was a video of a woman stealing two bushels of peaches off somebody else's property Comments are HEATED

Doe!

Alien: Earth ep 7

Last night of watercolor class! We painted dancers 🩰

Late night watercolor practice inside because the front porch is too buggy A little salt & pepper study!

Task on HBO has totally sucked me in Why are the rural drug crime dramas with regional accents so comforting? Is it the warmth of the untouched mid-century pine kitchens? The flip phones as exposition? The kid who’s hugging a chicken? Might as well be Shakespeare to me

Developers will never understand the world of pain they created for marketers by converting all the website logos to SVG All the little dynamic logos are so cute and performant but so much extra work to lift and port over to my slide deck presentations 😉

Was super inspired by this oil painting I saw here earlier, so I painted from reference for front porch watercolor practice tonight

Raising the piñata

Hot yoga today was so hot, the teacher’s phone—which was live streaming for remote participants—shut off 40 minutes into practice

Unfortunate side effect of having a bird dog in your house Sometimes bird dog brings actual birds into the house

Another painting from a color study example in a book Super fun and playful