Growth (and Growing Pains)

 

Four sides of a planter I made for one of my besties a couple of weeks ago. She LOVES plants and she was on vacation so we got to spend a couple of days together. The weather was excellent so we spent most of our time together hiking which is one of our favorite things to do and has been over the years. When we were teens we hiked the woods around our homes. When we were adults we took our daughters hiking with us. Then she moved  an hour and a half away when she got married to her current husband in 2007 and our full-time careers and lives got in the way. Now that I'm semi-retired, it makes meeting up with her so much easier when she has some vacation days! So, we had some spider plant babies, and I made this quick planter for her with a recycled juice jug and did a mixed media collage over the top. I tied it off with some green & tan raffia. I love how it turned out and I love recycled crafts in general so will try a few more of these out in the future with different finishes to see what holds out the best so I can maybe sell them down the road. For a first try, I love how this turned out though! It was rather on a whim, so I didn't do all the layers I would have liked to do (I do more layers in my art journal) but I didn't have the luxury of letting all the layers dry, but still, I'm pretty pleased. And my Jenners liked it, so that's all that counts.

I'm also on to my next art project which is a 4.5" x 4/5" handmade art journal which will have short poetry compositions in it--possibly all haiku or tanka, but I've barely gotten layer 1 complete, so I'd like to get more of the art complete to see how much room I'll have for words before I make that decision. It's also mixed media collage, which is where I'm in my happy place right now, so I'm sticking there for the time being. It's also a recycled/repurposed art project and so far I've used old cereal boxes, an old dryer sheet, napkin and I'm about to apply some texture with a frayed kitchen scrubby.

I'm getting kind of wiped out, so art is helping me zen out and recover a little from all the other activity lately. We saw Vanilla Fudge near St. Louis last weekend. They were meh. More washed up 80s band than awesome late 60s band (their songs that I loved were from their late 60s psych era) so I was a bit disappointed in their performance, but they still put on a good show and we had fun in the cute little town they played in. Next weekend we'll see Grand Funk Railroad in St. Louis which WILL be a great show, as we have seen them dozens of times, last time being last year at French Lick, Indiana. We plan to spend a bit of time in St. Louis too, so our neighbor will watch our puppy boys & kittens for us while we're away.

I'm wiped out because we have joined the predictable set of newly semi-retirees in that we discovered pickleball. It's gentler than racquetball by far, and even gentler than tennis because the court is shorter so there is less running around and the ball is slower because it's basically a wiffle ball. We are also taking martial arts lessons together. For me, it's all about self-defense and also some cross training for walking, dance and fitness. For my husband, it's about reliving one of his old passions. He's a 2nd degree black belt from another lifetime ago, so our skillset is vastly different, as I have very little martial arts in my background. What I do have that he doesn't is yoga & gymnastics in my background so a bit more flexibility. We're taking martial arts together twice a week and he's going once a week solo for extra training. On his extra day, it's my art and writing day, so I'm letting him go for some extra combat training that I'm not as interested in.

I will try to get more disciplined about posting. I hope to utilize Wednesdays for stuff like that but my Wednesdays are starting to really fill up now, so I need to figure out a new schedule I can work with!! So, until then, I may try to at least get some filler posts launched once a week on say a Saturday--about something I'm working on and hopefully augment that with a slice of life post on Wednesdays. That is my goal for this week. I'll take it one week at a time.

Happy 4th of July for my American friends. Happy belated Canada Day to my friends up north. To the rest of the world--enjoy the new week!!

How I Know I'm A Nerd

 

I know I'm a nerd for one simple fact. I think spreadsheets and databases are beautiful. I love them for their simplicity. I love them for their practicality. I love them for their logic. I love them because I get them because they get me. Once another lifetime ago, when I was a girl coder building databases for a living and on a heavy project at my full-time gig and then building databases for our consulting business and then building even more databases for my own personal projects, I had a dream where I *was* a database and I woke up totally getting it. It's the only time in my entire life I have ever felt truly organized. And, in a sense, in control of my past, present and future.

If only life could be a database, I'd muse--even then. Then everything would make perfect sense!

Unfortunately, life is that interminable bug that never finds a genuine fix, and we just keep finding workarounds. That's the place I find myself in these days, but I've been on a paper journaling kick lately and have been exploring a lot of old topics that used to excite me that I have abandoned over the years due to health, time constraints or things that just fell off my radar with the passage of time. We are about to kick our consulting business into high gear again, and I am behind the curve on database development now instead of on the cutting edge, so I'm thinking of taking some coursework to brush up on my skills so I can get our business launched again in this new world of AI.

But, it also got me thinking that maybe I could get organized in real life by putting my real life into a spreadsheet or database. If I saw my clutter in data sets rather than the overwhelming stacks in closets and my junk room and garage, would that help since I used to speak fluent database? I am admittedly a little rusty, but I don't think it would take too long to brush up.

Inching My Way Towards Confidently Failing Upwards

 It's been a while, dear readers. I haven't fallen off the face of the earth, though we almost did. Long story there and I won't have an opportunity to write about it today, but will write about it soon. Still carrying on. Still dancing, and walking. Photo is from a May hike on a gorgeous day in Des Moines. I'm in my fifties now. How did that happen!? I'll celebrate my 54th birthday next month. Hubs is lucky to have celebrated his 70th birthday in April. He had a stroke 3 years ago and was given life saving treatment in less than 10 minutes of his stroke. We are aware of how lucky we are and we are living life to its fullest. I do still blog. I rediscovered my blog over at LiveJournal. I wanted to blog in a smaller sphere for a while as I sorted through the aftermath of telling on my abusive father, but I'm ready to be more public again. I think. I'll continue blogging there, too, as I've met some really cool people on that platform.

We are semi-retired as of January 1st this year! We are still working on a handful of cases and our consulting business from home and I do some work for hubs's former partner (our brother-in-law) from time-to-time at the office, but he is also scaling back and has a part-time assistant helping him. I only get called in for special projects or if she is unavailable. I'm taking a break this afternoon from working on a spreadsheet of federal cases going to trial in the upcoming months. It's nice working from home other than hubs thinks that means I'm available to work 24/7 so I had to set some boundaries. Namely, Wednesdays are my days off and weekends are days off from legal work too, so we can get caught up on home projects.

Wednesdays are art days, mainly. I was invited by my watercolor instructor to Studio time on Wednesday mornings at the Art Guild, so I've been going. It's been wonderful! I've been creating more art than writing, which is okay. I'm creating and that's the important thing. Since I told on the monster, I haven't felt as compelled to write, although I am still writing quite a bit of poetry.

Possibly my best news is that my eyes are lasting about an hour or two longer a day than they were. They still can't last a full day, but I can use them at longer stretches than before. I have to admit, not being able to use my eyes for prolonged periods has shot my focus all to hell though, and if I wasn't certain I had ADD issues before, I'm VERY convinced now. heh

This is my year of shedding my fear of failure, so I am inching my way towards a YouTube channel where I explore things I've always wanted to do but was afraid I'd fart up. One of those things is a fear of being in front of a camera instead of behind it. So...wish me luck. My first baby goal will be to post a couple of teasers before the end of the month. I'm training for a sub 45-minute walking 5k at the end of July (though I'm getting over a head and chest cold that has knocked me out 3 weeks of training, and with lupus, I will just be happy to make it through the race without passing out at this point!!!) and the other teaser will be just for starting the channel. I have another teaser already filmed for Shimmy Mob (belly dance), but we don't have a date set for when we'll perform yet, so I'm not ready to release it yet.

A lot has changed here at good ole Blogger. I need a refresher course on how to find everyone's blogs and how to get mine out and about. I'll share this to my Twitter feed until then. Peace, love & butterflies, y'all! Until next time. xoxo 🦋