Some days it just doesn't work

OK, my viewing public has spoken, so I'll keep posting my artwork up here, such as it is.

Today was not a great day for sketching, at least not for me. Some days it just doesn't work so well. There was no wind in the morning when I dropped the girls at day camp, so I went down to the little roadside pullover to do some practice on skies and water reflections. At first it looked like this, nice and calm and great reflections. (No, this is not the same location as yesterday, although it's fairly similar).

This is the earlier sketch of the scene that I posted, from a slightly different viewpoint a few yards to the right:

But here's the result from today - those reflections were just not working right, and I kept scrubbing things out and trying to layer and re-drawing and just making it all muddy:

And then in a few minutes, the wind came up and the reflections were mostly obliterated, and the sun started hiding behind the clouds. But then the skies were much prettier so I took a few photos of clouds for reference later on some day:

Oh well. Practice, practice, practice until you get it right! They say the thing to do is just keep using paper as if you owned a paper factory. Okay. . . .

I gave up for the day and wiped the pastel dust off my hands and went back to the Y for a swim. My frustration let me swim a little faster than I usually do - first 500 yards was 10:55 (even with a stop to fix my watchband), and another 250 was 5:27. Maybe some day I can work those times down to under a minute per lap routinely.