Creative
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It’s Been A Day | 30 Days of Writing
Last night I did not envision for today: +A kid waking up with an earache at midnight and continued to sleep terribly the rest of the night. There’s been congestion for days that I was hoping we’d just wade through. +Me getting a second night of bad sleep. +Knowing earache meant a trip to the pediatrician, so planning for that at midnight. +Realizing I also needed to get my laptop to work at home. +Making plans for that after calling the pediatrician at 8am and driving to the office where in the middle of updating Chris, who is out of town, of what was going on I get an alert…
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Tendrils of Fall | 30 Days of Writing
A glimpse of fall happened this morning. Forest led the way out the door and as I stepped out behind him, pushed the key into the lock and turned it to secure the house, I felt tendrils of cool air on my legs. Not quite cool enough to grab a fleece, but the kind of morning you would spend drinking some coffee on the porch and then puttering about the yard for an hour before heat and humidity seeped into the day. It’s almost mid-September, about the time to start getting these teases. A little cool to remind you that Texas will be released from the hold of swampy moisture…
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Diana Baby 110 Toy Camera | Fun with Film #1
After Christmas in 2019 I bought some 110 film from Lomography, one of the few places you can buy 110 film these days other than old expired rolls off of Ebay or Etsy, and also a toy camera, the Diana Baby 110. I also had a pink Concord 110 camera from childhood and wanted to take photos with it as well. And so the last 2.5 years I’ve been shooting a photo or two at a time on them. I’m unsure what exactly happened with this photo, I thought perhaps it was supposed to be a double exposure but it looks like half the film is from one photo and…
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Art with Hummingbirds
While in New Mexico I had hopes to spend more time working on some sketchbook art, primarily my perpetual nature journal that I started in early September last year. I’m several months behind because I sunk into a pit of not doing anything in May so I’ve been continuously working to get back on top of things. A perpetual nature journal is one that has some flexibility but ideally you are using one page or set of pages to chronicle something in nature for a certain time period on every year until that page is full. Mine is set up weekly, though the weeks will slide a bit as they…
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Second Quarter Reading Wrap-Up 2022
As per usual, I hit a reading slump around May which lasted through most of June. I didn’t finish a book for about six weeks but I am slowly climbing out of that hole. I will likely have another slump, based on years of noticing my pattern, sometime later this summer. Which is why I do a lot of reading at the beginning to the year to counterbalance it all. I’m currently at 35/45 for my Goodreads challenge and I suspect I will end up around the 60 book mark again this year when all is said and done. Audiobooks are still carrying a heavy weight in the count but…
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First Quarter Reading Wrap-Up 2022
A few years ago I regularly did Monthly Book Reports but that fell by the wayside. It’s hard to believe it has been so long but I think I’m going to bring them back in the form of quarterly updates with my favorites from the previous three months. For the first quarter of the year I’ve read 19 books. Some were great, others I muddled through, and I abandoned one or two. It has been good to see so many people talk about abandoning books that you can’t get into because I was a former “finisher” and it is something I still cling to and am working on. Sure, it…
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Postcard Art | 1
Winter means that my studio is too chilly for me to work in usually, and so I have been making do with watercolors inside the house. I keep several sketchbooks and now some watercolor postcard paper on my desk and have been working away these last few weeks on small art pieces that I am mailing out to folks. I’m trying to do monthly themes, January’s was orchids, as you can see. February is currently abstract and I think March will be native plants or spring. All of these are taken but when I have others in the future I will share them here and if you want a little…
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Top 5 Books I Read in 2021
Last year I read 60+ books (not counting the ones I read with Forest) and I keep tabs of it over on Goodreads. Feel free to friend me over there if you’d like! By far the heavy lifting of my reading last year was audiobooks and I have significantly replaced podcast listening with audiobooks over the last two years. If you keep your audiobooks to 10 hours and under and listen at 1.5-2x speeds then you can easily read an audiobook every few days or so. I listen while I work most often but I have tasks that don’t allow me to focus on two things at once so I…
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Winning at Writing
On a whim at the end of October I decided to actually participate in Nanowrimo. Back in the mid 2000s I gave it a half-hearted go and quit pretty early, enough that I didn’t even have any of it documented in my Nano account. I hadn’t logged in there in years and saw the last time I gave it a real whirl was in 2011, when I was writing my FT hiking memoir. I made it to something like 26K words, I believe, at that time. I accidentally deleted that after I logged in and tried to set up my new book. Oh well. The only way I was going…
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Forest’s Rainbow Afghan
Saturday evening I finally finished Forest’s rainbow afghan that he requested last fall. His original request was for a rainbow blanket with red and blue on the ends. My original thought was to use the yarn I already had but then thinking about having to switch yarn every couple of rows didn’t sound appealing. Forest and I ended up finding and agreeing on the self striping Lion Brand Mandala Yarn in Gnome, Cupid, and Spirit colorways. And I LOVE IT! Honestly, I want it for myself which means I’m going to borrow it as much as possible! Hah! I started on it sometime last November but royally screwed up the…
