Blogging

I see a lot of blogs. I love reading them. Whether it's about art, craft, techniques, photography, dogs, cooking, you name it, I love it. Then at times, you start wondering why you visit certain ones more often than others. I am speaking solely for myself when I say 'people'. It's the person behind the blog that captures you, not the knitted mittens, but what they say about those mittens.

If you blog about one particular subject, then you are going to attract the demographic that is interested in that topic. This doesn't make it easier on bloggers, like me, who like so many things and I always go back to why I started to blog in the first place when I wonder why I do it at all.

I live far away from my family and many of my friends. In a way I thought they would enjoy seeing what I was up to. You know, the way you show a visiting friend your latest sketch or mittens, for that matter. Some visit regularly but some have never seen it. I forget that there are people who haven't been pounding away at a computer for years, the way I have. They are perfectly happy that they are able to email and have no further interest, and that is fine.

So, in short, I write the blog for myself, and if I can share with someone, then that is an extra perk. (It's like keeping a photo album, that you only show to visitors).

My brother once said to me, when I indicated that I wasn't interested in computers all too much, that I would be smart if I did a couple of courses, because computers were not going to go away.

They didn't, and they guided me to the BLOG, and to the pleasure of blogging.

These are the things (I think) I have learned along the way:

1. Blogging is a lonely business, therefore comments and reactions are fun and you make new friends by commenting.

2. Be yourself in your blog and post your own work, or link back if it is by someone else.

3. There is a blog etiquette. People appreciate your comments; they often email you, and if you become a follower of their blog, they often follow yours. 

4. Blog frequently but not too frequently. Three blogs a week is what I go for, besides you need time to think and come up with something original.

5. Make it clear in a post what it's about. Don't upload a mixed bag of things. The reader soon moves on if it gets confusing. Rambling doesn't work well either. Don't make your blogs too long (like this one is sure to be).

6. Join a group of like-minded souls. Place a button on your blog, so others can find it. My hits went up from around 50 to around 100 a day in the last months since I joined two groups.

7. Never be afraid to comment. I have received lovely chatty emails from some of my Blog-Idols, making it even more fun to follow their blog.

8. A no-brainer is to always be polite on a blog, not to discuss anyone else, unless it's in glowing colors and do not whine.

9. I get the most hits on my blog from Google Images, 'Paper cuts', so I just head paper cut posts headers as 'Paper Cut'. 30% of my hits come from Paper Cuts Images. I don't know where people find my stories but 'Poppies, Poppies will put them to sleep', has a little reader base all of its own as do some of my other little essays, which lately, I having been keeping as short as I can - less is more, sort of thing.

10. The more active you are as a blogger, blog reader and commenter the more your reader-base will grow. 

....and know when to stop.

The above image was made with a black and white photo I made at a Pow Wow and using 'brushes' in Photoshop. I am on a learning curve.

Listening to: "Belgrave Square" by Anne Perry.  

 

The 12th mystery in the beloved Inspector and Charlotte Pitt Victorian mystery series. When a moneylender named William Weems is murdered, there is discreet rejoicing among those whose meager earnings he devoured. But the plot thickens when Inspector Pitt finds a list of London's distinguished gentlemen in Weems' office.

Not quite into it.

The Okavango

The Okavango Delta is a place of beauty. Tucked away in the heart of Botswana, it is a sanctuary for birds and wildlife. We traveled to the island, where we would set up camp, in mokoros; hollowed out tree trunks which are punted through the shallow waters of the delta, keeping a leery eye out for hippopotamus. If we were thirsty we would dip a cup over the side of the canoe, and drank deeply, having been told that the water was pure.

Cape buffalo looked up as we passed by, water dripping from their mouths and elephants cautiously watched us, sniffing the air with their trunks.  It was exciting as well as very idyllic.

After we had set up camp under a Sausage tree that would occasionally drop an enormous torpedo-like pod to the ground, the men in the group went down to the water to fill the jerrycans, while we, women, watched.

A fisherman stood thigh-deep in the shallows, while he fanned out his hand-made net and threw it into the darkening waters. All was well with the world. But wait, what is that I see? What do the weights of his net resemble? Batteries, large flashlight batteries! I waded out to take a closer look and saw that the batteries had holes drilled right through to attach them to the net. In my mind's eye I could see the cadmium oozing out into the pure waters of the Okavango, that I had drunk so deeply and without a care.

That night, as I made my last stop behind a bush, I watched closely to see if my pee didn't glow in the dark, but was distracted by another enormous sausage whizzing past my ear to drop to the ground with a thud and hastily made my way back to my tent by the light beaming from my eyes.

I am cleaning out memorabilia, and found some wonderful old postcards that my family had sent each other while they lived in Africa. I used a card by C. Barry to draw this wonderful wise woman. I drew with pen and nib and Indian Ink without setting up a sketch first. Wanted to see if I could sketch without an eraser.

Odosketch

My early morning Sunday ritual is going through my favorite blogs with tea or hot cocoa (or Diet Coke, depending on the weather) and if at all possible, a pain au chocolat or something similar. How About Orange mentioned Odosketch and I went to look. I just drew something really quickly, but for the true sketchers of this world, this might be quite enjoyable. Your sketch will come out better than mine, because I uploaded mine, as I couldn't find where it was embedded.

This well-preserved woman sat at a table in the restaurant where I had dinner last night, eating almost nothing.

Painted Yupo background

This is what happened to the Yupo background I made earlier. The colors were so hot that it begged for something cold, so I added a steely eyed geisha, who, looking at her now, has Stephen Fry's chin. Not that this bothers me, because SF is one of my favorite people. I also used a stamp that I made sometime ago out of Mastercarve.

Yupo Experiment 1

For some time I have been trying to tame the beast called Yupo, a synthetic water resistant paper; an alternative for traditional art papers. With only whip and chair to protect me, Yupo still keeps snarling and will not do what I want. 

This weekend I started on a series of experiments to enable me to understand this 100% polypropylene paper, with which some people make such beautiful work. 
You either love Yupo, or hate it, and I think that this depends on how you have worked in the past. Watercolor paper absorbs water, Yupo resists it, and the pigment lies on top of the Yupo after the water has evaporated. This to most, is a new way of working.


All I did with Yupo this weekend, was experiment with backgrounds and different textures.

* I used regular table salt, and I haven't brushed it off yet.
* This is Winsor & Newton Designer's Goache in yellow and pink.
* I added a couple of drops of rubbing alcohol on the paper before letting it dry.
* Somehow I am reminded of my Sunday breakfast.
* Overall: the colors remained vibrant. I think that once I remove the salt, it may affect the colors, dulling them somewhat.

I wet the Yupo before applying any pigments, then used Dr Martin, and let them run. I might have used too much ink, and in this case I moved the paper about until I got a pleasing mix and applied plastic wrap. It took a long time to dry, and even though I had 'molded' interesting lines in the plastic wrap, I still find this a little flat.
* The most interesting part in this, is the line from top to bottom because I couldn't curb my impatience and took a peek.
* All in all, a little too dark for my taste and a bit muddy due to the inks mixing a lot or too much even.
* I see an 'eye looking back at me.

Back to the gouache. Lighter on the touch. Water first on the Yupo; mixed paint to a liquid creamy consistency, and a drop or two of rubbing alcohol.
* Some areas still too dark, to my liking, with nothing very interesting going on. Used some brown ink in this, which in some areas had a nice effect.

Monochrome, on wet Yupo using the tipping and dripping technique with gouache. This 'complex' technique brings out your inner child. I used two pieces of plastic wrap, just because I fumbled with the tearing of it, and ended up with 2 small pieces. One on the top and one on the bottom, leaving a strip uncovered, where I added a few small drops of rubbing alcohol which created a little stream of planets.

One last experiment, which I think worked well. This is a messy little painting, that I used to try out several things, but the one that worked well was using wax crayons to outline your drawing, instead of pencil. All the white on the cups was done with a white wax crayon. I liked the effect. Yevgenia Watts mentions this in her Youtube tutorial.


I looked at the work of several artists who use Yupo very successfully and produce wonderful paintings on it.

Here is a short list of some names:

Ursula Rodrigues - shown on ArtCafe.net (sorry, didn't copy the links. Too busy Yupo-ing) ursularodrigues.com.
D.D. Gadjanski at ddgadjanski.ca
Yevgenia Watts at watercoloredhands.wordpress.com
Judy (can't find a last name) at dedraad.blogspot.com
and others.


I am by no means finished with Yupo, in spite of the snarls.

Collage.

I started out drawing a bird with my brown Micron 01 pen. I had intended to keep work in my little 'art' book in sepia and earthy tones. Just seemed to be the thing, but once again color won. While working on the bird I started finding it very boring, although I did try to move away from drawing a bird from the side. Then, you know how it goes, I pasted in some postage stamps because the pages are 5" by 8", and don't allow for anything very large, and from there I grabbed a magazine and color started seeping into the work and it turned out into a little collage. I cut out half of the bird, so that its wing came free from the paper, which in my eyes, gives the impression that it is breaking free from the collage.

EDM Challenge 125 - draw a bird.

Listened to a nice little historic mystery while doing this:  
Gaius Petrius Ruso is a divorced and down-on-his-luck army doctor who has made the rash decision to seek his fortune in an inclement outpost of the Roman Empire, namely Britannia. His arrival in Deva (more commonly known today as Chester, England) does little to improve his mood, and after a 36-hour shift at the army hospital, he succumbs to a moment of weakness and rescues an injured slave girl, Tilla, from the hands of her abusive owner. Now he has a new problem: a slave who won't talk and can't cook, and drags trouble in her wake. Before he knows it, Ruso is caught in the middle of an investigation into the deaths of prostitutes working out of the local bar. A few years earlier, after he rescued Emperor Trajan from an earthquake in Antioch, Ruso seemed headed for glory: now he's living among heathens in a vermin-infested bachelor pad and must summon all his forensic knowledge to find a killer who may be after him next. Who are the true barbarians, the conquered or the conquerors? It's up to Ruso (certainly the most likeable sleuth to come out of the Roman Empire) to discover the truth. With a gift for comic timing and historic detail, Ruth Downie has conjured an ancient world as raucous and real as our own. 


.....and Audible.com is letting you download an Elizabeth Peters' book for FREE. If you like mysteries  then you will like this easy to listen to and humorous mystery book set in Egypt in Victorian times.

Just in case the picture I posted made you cross-eyed, I am posting one that was taken a little further away. 

My photo came in first.

My picture of Athena came in first in Yevgenia Watts' "Blirthday Contest". 

How cool is that?

 

......and the cactus flowers came in third. 

I will be receiving the originals of the paintings. 

Have a look at the artist's blog to see her work.  

http://watercoloredhands.wordpress.com/
 

 

Bangs.

My mother took care of my bangs when I was a little girl. Every so many weeks I would sit down with a sheet wrapped around me, and my mother would snip away. She is quite the perfectionist, so if she thought the bangs were crooked, she would rectify that with another couple of snips, and for good measure a couple more. I don't know if it was fashionable at the time, but I went through my early life with really short bangs.

Stand still and you move backwards.

Oh dear. I know I am in a bad relationship........with my cell phone. We started out amicably enough and it seemed like such a wonderful thing to have him around all the time but over the years, I have become a little unsure. Of course, he comes to my rescue when I have a flat tire, and calls AAA or when I am running late for an appointment. But he demands a lot of attention, by playing that annoying little tune, that I always mean to change and never do. Just when I am totally engrossed in something he will pipe up and then I have to find him. He is usually in his favorite place, at the bottom of my bag. There are days when I suddenly realize that it has been awfully quiet for a long time and then find him in the car, sulking, his little belly flashing an angry red light.

Perhaps it's not so much my cell phone that I am no longer enamored with but his family. Sit down to dinner with company in a nice restaurant and a member of his family is often placed in a prominent position, as if it were another piece of vital cutlery. They then jingle, and even though not answered, there is still that little gap in the conversation as eyes glance down to see who is on the line. "What was that you were saying?". 

Worse still is when the cell phone becomes an accessory, held in the hand at all times, just in case a vital call comes in which they invariably do. "Oh, I am in line at the store, what are you doing?". 

So here I am. I no longer like him or his extended family since they have taken over like little alien beings, infiltrating almost every aspect of our lives. It's unavoidable, we will be sucked into their big black hole whether we like it or not and all end up talking in Tweets.

The photo was taken here in the Southwest, before going digital and still used my Minolta and would develop my own photos in the darkroom. Check the picture for bullet holes.

Rice paper and powder.

Several years ago I found a little box at the drugstore, which quite amazingly was empty and yet for sale. It was a pretty box and I have a 'thing' for little boxes, so by the time I walked out the door, the pretty box was mine. It was an ideal container for the nibs for my ink pens, but in reality its purpose was just to be pretty.

I have always wanted to draw the picture on the box and now I have.

If I ever thought I had found a treasure, then I was wrong. I have since discovered that the box is an ordinary commercial item and still being sold. When opening the box it should have contained little sheets of rice paper with rice powder to blot a shiny nose. Still, I am perfectly happy with my box, empty or not, because every time I look at it, it feeds my imagination.

These are more the real colors. The scanner made some changes of it's own. 

Paper: Strathmore Bristol smooth 260gsm

Paint: Winsor & Newton Designers Gouache, Micron 01

Brush: No. 6 Loew-Cornell

Technique: Gouache, crosshatch shading

Level of enjoyment while making: high

EDM Challenge 185.

When we bought a house in France we didn’t realize that the purchase price included 15 cats. There seemed to be cats everywhere: snoozing in the shade, under one of the many rose bushes, sitting on the wall blinking in the sun or making a dash for it as we approached.

I had never thought about cats as anything else than pets and had no idea that half-wild or feral cats existed.

It also took a few days for us to understand that this was an enormously incestuous little clowder. Down the road lived a stringy tom who was the granddaddy of them all and who would make his rounds to his harem several times a day. Our own (neutered) cat only watched from a safe distance or came indoors with a disgusted air that said, “I want no part in this”. It was all a little too uncivilized for his taste, I believe.

After the second litter had arrived, I decided that it was time return all the cats and whenever there was an opportunity I would put on ‘the gloves’ hoping that I would be successful at catching cat and putting it in a box to take it three villages down to it’s owners. Every so many days I would make the journey with a box containing a snarling, scratching cat on the seat beside me and show up at their door.

It was a cold, wet and windy April night when I looked out of the window and saw a cat crawling out of the neighbor’s basement and making a wild dash to our side of the road.

When I later went to look in the laundry room that we used as a potting shed, there were three kittens in a corner on a sack, their eyes still closed. This was the litter that stayed, although their Mother Mimi was later delivered to her rightful owners, who managed a sour smile, because I don’t think they really wanted me to return their cats and were wondering when this would stop. Mimi was the last.

My brother adopted the two males and called them Mad Max and Dirty Harry, I kept the little gray female.

In the drawing Dirty Harry and my little gray kitten share a basket. She was with me for 19 years.

Challenge 185: Draw a cat. 
I decided to try the dreaded watercolors again, and ended up using them as I would gouache. Not quite the intention. The paper is 300 gsm, cold pressed Fabriano watercolor paper, which contains 25% cotton. For a brush I used a medium Niji waterbrush.

The watercolor paint is Pelican. For watercolor I prefer a box because tubes of paint can dry out seeing I do so few watercolors. Seeing that the paint isn't really very transparent I must have the box with opaque paint. All Dick Blick.

Listened to "Staying On" by Paul Scott, author of "The Jewel in The Crown".
In this sequel to The Raj Quartet, Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley stay on in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status. Finally fed up with accommodating her husband, Lucy claims a degree of independence herself. Eloquent and hilarious, she and Tusker act out class tensions among the British of the Raj and give voice to the loneliness, rage, and stubborn affection in their marriage.Staying On won the Booker Prize and was made into a motion picture starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in 1979.

Lengua.

 

I had been to Mexico, which is only about 15 minutes away, but decided to eat in my favorite downtown Mexican restaurant anyway, where everything is authentic, including the decor. More authentic than the restaurants in the little town over the border that cater to our winter visitors.

For some time I had been thinking of having some tongue.  My grandmother would make marinaded tongue for sandwiches now and again. Lengua (tongue) is on the menu of most good Mexican restaurants and that's what I ordered.

As I waited I remembered that my grandmother would never allow me to peek in the pan while the tongue was boiling, because tongue can look rather unappetizing during preparation.

When my plate was put before me, I blinked a couple of times and  immediately knew that I was in for an adventure. Here was tongue in a very authentic state, with unidentifiable bits and bobs here and there, and some of the skin attached. It looked nothing like the succulent, thin slices of  marinaded meat of my grandmother's table.

I was as brave as I could be, and inwardly scolded myself for being such a big baby as I gingerly nibbled at my food. Perhaps next time, I should order  enchiladas like every self-respecting gringa. 

EDM Challenge 293

This is not recent work but I had recently scanned it. It is made on gesso layered with Indian Ink and scratched out so that you get a negative effect, which works very well for something made of glass.

EDM Challenge 304

Just a quick doodle to draw a bow and to use the watercolor pencils I have had in my drawer for as long as I can remember. "Everyday Matters" makes me want to do things I have not done before, and I think that this is what it is all about.

Paper Cut Collage. Moon in Pond.

So why make things easy when you can make them hard? This project started off quite innocently. Someone had given me Mexican chocolate and I saved the wrappers. Then one evening last week I make a fish. 

I quickly draw a fish on cardstock and painstakingly stick little pieces of wrapper paper on it.
Then I decide to make a pond. Of course, I first cut the waterlily pads because that's fun to do with some cardstock I had in my stack.
As I go along I make a rippled moon and decide to make my own background. 

I realize that for the lay-out I want, I need a background sheet of 30x35 cm, so I texturize 2 Yupo pages with ink and watercolors. I have little experience with Yupo and the experience I do have does not make me grab it often (I am not a watercolorist). However, this works really well and I use a sponge brush, a sponge roller and a little natural sponge (very spongy all this) to make something that looks like water.

In order to make it look like one sheet, I cut (I use an exacto) one side of one sheet in a wave pattern; paste my Yupo sheets to a cracker box for support, and paste down the various elements.

I also paste some of the snippets that I cut out to blend the two pages in the collage adding a little more dimension. Then I discover that I cannot seem to shoot a good picture of the finished project without trying out six different ways and still not succeeding.


What did I learn?
Do not use candy wrappers in a project that will take many hours to make. 
Candy wrapper paper does not look great on a photo.
Cracker boxes give excellent support in a pinch.
Yupo is nice after all. Here is my first attempt. It makes good backgrounds and offers me new possibilities now.
I really like paper cutting. Yupo cutting might be even better because you glide right through.


I listened to "A Murderous Procession" by Ariana Franklin, downloaded at Audible.com while working on this project.

National best-selling author Ariana Franklin resumes her Mistress of the Art of Death series with A Murderous Procession. In 1176, King Henry II's daughter is set to marry the king of Sicily. But when several wedding guests are murdered during the procession, Adelia must uncover who is behind the killings and who is the killer's real target. 

Left or Right?

My cupboards and closets are usually tidy, my table-tops not so much. I have no concern about driving with my fuel light blinking. I remember faces for years and years, surprising people that I can place whenever I first met them. I don't remember names. My sense of time, it has been proven time and time again, is non-existent. Yet, I am a planner and a list-maker. Visual and verbal are equally present in me. I use my hands a lot when I speak. I am very patient, especially with people, but very spontaneous in many things. Some of my best travel destinations were decided in 30 minutes and the ticket bought the same day.

All in all, I am right brain dominant.

Please don't ask me to do the same thing over and over again, so that I might become proficient in it, because boredom will most certainly set in, and with boredom comes distraction, and once distracted, you have lost me.

My mother, who is neat and structured, tried for many years to teach me how to sew my own clothes. I would have the most wonderful time sketching what I wanted my dress to look like, go out, chose the fabric, but when I started sewing I used that same wild enthusiasm, which would not work out quite as well. It always resulted in me having to undo seams and buttonholes, and eventually  in frustration. My mother would give me her 'little look' and end up making the dress, finishing it in fine, little stitches. How could it be that her daughter couldn't do this?

Left brain versus right brain, but we didn't know that then.

The picture of the Mexican tiled stairs was made in Tucson. Such a neat and structured pattern.

 

A Glowing New Year.

I added some glow to the New Year by using Chinese joss paper in which to cut some portals, like the ones you see in Yemen. Let's see what this year will bring.

Miss Potato Nose.

This past year, like Alice, I went down the rabbit hole. No Queen of Hearts in my story, but a Miss Potato Nose. She also yelled, "Off with their heads", at the top of her lungs, while she swung her machete around and changed the life of all of those about her.
I have read and reread the book by Martha Stout: The Sociopath Next Door. I had read it prior to having my head cut off and still could do nothing when it happened because we want to believe that those whom we like cannot be so heartless. 
Only now am I getting round to it, and I have acquired a nice new potato-peeler.

Paper Cut.

I have a problem - well perhaps more than one, but I have such a broad interest in everything around me that I always find myself doing something new. It's probably what I need, or I would specialize. 
Since I bought some printed paper this whimsical cut-out just wouldn't go away till I made her.

Gandhiji

More stamps than envelope, it seems. Gandhiji's tranquil face looking back at me multiple times, like looking through a kaleidoscope.
Last time I went to the post office they were out of 98 cent stamps and I bought 1 dollar ones, which are far prettier. I think I will continue doing that. They might even have different ones, which will make my envelopes more interesting too. Of course, I could just stick on 100 penny stamps.

Paper mosaic.

When a day is just plodding along, or worse than that even, when very little seems to go the way I would like it to go, then I am totally taken aback when I suddenly come across something that will just flood my head with ideas and flush out any disappointing feelings I may have.
It can be something simple. Like this morning when I saw a picture of a caterpillar, and the colors were so wild, that I immediately wanted to make a vividly colored caterpillar of my own. Recently I saw a program about fractals and there I went again, like Alice down the rabbit hole. Head spinning with inspiration.

Words, that are strung beautifully, do it to me too. 

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
 – Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
  

If I can't mosaic anything of scale, then why not mosaic something small and light. That is what you see in the picture. I am making paper mosaic tiles and placing them on a little wooden box. It looks like nothing this close, but when finished I will post the end result and it will look entirely different. You will see.

The Big Hat.

Your life experiences build you layer upon layer into whom you eventually become. It is also the life experiences of those whom you encounter along the way, that influence you in becoming who you are. As a woman, I have a strong admiration for women who disown certain conventions and seek out the experiences that make them multi-faceted and very interesting. I can name a few from the past, Baroness von Blixen, Mary Kingsley, Margaret Mead, Delia Akeley and Isabella Bird a.o. If you think that there are no modern day women who adventure out, then names like Jane Goodall and Alicia Colson come to mind, but granted I can find very few and most are scientists. However on the bright side, there is Sophie, who writes a blog journal about her hotel in the West African town of Djenne, Mali, where she has settled. Sophie, in turn introduces Edith Watts, of Papua New Guinea, in her October 18th, 2010 blog entry. Fascinating women. But they are not the only ones. Many women these days travel the world (outside the tourist circuit), live in little known pockets of the world and do interesting things. One day, future generations will hear of them, only, right now, it is not easy to find them even on the internet. 
Let's hope that they are keeping journals. 

It was Sophie who mentioned "wearing the big hat" when writing about Edith Watts and when I was going through my black and white photographs from a while back, I found this one of my mother.

Foreign movies.

You say tomato, I say tomahto. When I say ball, you hear bowl. Seriously. 

A friend was going to bring my dog to the office, and I asked her to also bring the bowl. She called to say that there was no bowl in the kitchen. Puzzled, I told there was one by the fridge and heard her say, "Oh, you want her ball". I have told this story to others and Americans hear bowl for ball and I, when they say it, hear ball for bowl and bowl for ball. As if life is not confusing enough.

I was having dinner with a very likable man and we were making the usual small talk, which I am not good at even at the best of times. I asked him what kind of movies he liked and distinctly heard him say, "porn movies". I know my eyes must have glazed over when I looked up from my plate. He held my gaze and said again, "forn movies", (which I know are, to some people, almost the same as porn movies). "Ah", I said somewhat relieved, "forrin movies". 

Oh well, you say tomato, I say, tomahto. What does it matter? No reason to call the whole thing off.

I used pen and ink (Hydrus, Phthalo Green and Venetian Brown) for the peacock feather and washed in a watercolor for the yellow.
Lately some readers have asked if the photos and drawings are my own. Everything used in my blog is my own and all photos, writing, drawings and made objects etc are done by me with the exception of a few and I always mention if they are by someone else in the text.

Twitter & Tumblr & More.

I think my head is about to explode. I just don't understand where people find the time to do it all, and I don't even mean ALL. I mean, what they do behind their computers. I get numerous personal emails that need responses. I get business emails that need to be taken care of. I Blog, and if you are reading this you already know that. Then this Summer a friend invited me to see her photos on Facebook. Turns out you need to register to be able to see them, and once registered, there were many happy reunions with people from the past. People who had worked for me, friends who I had lost touch with and friends I see monthly, weekly or daily too. Soon I had a bunch of friends. Then there was the Tweeting, but I drew the line there, because I am hopeless at small talk and that seemed like small talk to me. But I like to at least know what is out there, so checked into Tumblr, which is a blogging system that I know I don't need. I like Flickr. I spend some time there now and then because I like seeing other peoples photos, but I have never uploaded any of my own. 

Now I come across Pinterest. Which is interesting, but I just don't see how one can manage it all.......and yes, many bloggers whose blogs I read, have Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, and some others.

Between the phone, the mobile phone, text messaging, emailing and T, F, F, T and the others, reading blogs and actually living life and reading a book now and then, I think I have no option but to let my head explode. Perhaps I am taking this Slow and Simple idea too seriously, and should leap back into the Speed and Stress lane again, where everyone's head has already exploded.

What's the rush?

 

Lately, I seem to have been looking down a little more, and that's how I found the feathers that I stuck in my little art book. The ragged looking one will make a great stamp.

The day before Thanksgiving I was on the grocery store parking lot, in the middle of mayhem. A well-dressed man in a nice car was so concerned that I would take the parking spot he had his eye on that he stopped his car right in front of mine. I mimed something that was supposed to say: now what are you doing? His reaction was not well-dressed at all, but I had no time for him because two cars down, a car had backed into another.

What's wrong with having Thanksgiving on some boring Sunday in February? Travel will be cheap and the airports not crowded. There will be months of time for dinner preparations and getting the house in perfect shape for company. There will be no family feud about going to the one for dinner and not to the other. Shopping will be a pleasure in the almost empty stores.

Why not turn everything inside-out and upside-down and walk to the beat of your own drum?