are we out of focus here?

over on my studio blog someone commented the other day that they didn't know how I could work on so many different things at once.

it's that whole issue of focus

as in, I have a very hard time doing that

and thus has it ever been -- in fact it is that inability to focus continuously on one thing that has brought me to realize that I will never write the world's great novel

writing anything longer than a letter to a friend or a blog post requires more focus than comes naturally to me, and at this point in my life I don't see the advantage to it

I want to try things

lots of things that have to do with art

which means one successful project leads to experimenting with another -- then another -- until what the original project was is completely lost but I've found half a dozen others that are successful too

I've learned over the past two or three years to stop beating myself up about that

not that I don't regret from time to time not having focused while I was in the corporate world -- if I'd done that I might have an income and (gasp!) maybe even health insurance now

but then as now, I didn't have the patience for the "ordinaryness" of it -- once I'd done it once, I wanted to move on to something else -- not do the same thing over and over and over

the one place I was able to focus was in trying to keep my daughter on track -- food on the table, roof over the head and telling her not to make my mistakes --- I think I did a pretty good job of that (not to brag on myself here, but she's pretty damned awesome!)

so, about this time of year I think about this whole issue (my birthday's coming, what have I accomplished, blah, blah, blah)

this year I'm feeling okay with that

I'm making art, we're surviving financially -- at least for today, and right now neither one of us has any new major health issues -- its a whole new definition of success

I'll take it

Census

we've been counted

our form arrived in the mail yesterday

it took us about 10 minutes (just as advertised)

as someone who has done family history, I can tell you that this census asks for almost no information

from the questions you will have no idea 70 years from now (when it will be available to family history searchers) what we did for a living or where we were born or even if we were citizens of the USA

pretty small information for future family history

but it is important none the less

when you get yours, spend the 10 minutes, send it in (you don't even need a stamp!)

don't make the census workers have to come and knock on your door (consider that your contribution to helping the cost of taking the census a little less)

just DO IT!

1000 Posts Give Away

Over on my other blog, I have posted 1000 times (how amazing is that!?)

To celebrate, I'm giving away this piece of my hand made Rocky Mountain Beach Glass jewelry

You can use this link to hop on over and see more about it and enter to win.

(Come on, you know you want to!)

Confessions of a 3rd generation pack rat

it is truly scary what a mess one can create when one lives in the same place for 8 years at a stretch

we've lived in this house for longer than I've lived in any one place my entire adult life

and there are two other bad things happening here --- I don't like to clean -- the kitchen and bathrooms are clean enough to be healthy, other parts of the house, well, you can walk through there

and the DH is not a cleaner either (guess that's my job)

and he collects stuff too -- maybe worse than I do

so there you are

but we really want to put our house on the market, which means I need to get it ready

so I'm starting in this room, a bedroom that at one time had a bed and a dresser and a desk and a bookcase and a bench in it -- and now all of that furniture (except the bench) is in my daughter's house, so this became the place to stash stuff

and last year at this time I had a table and grow lights in there so we could get seeds started for the garden

and I'm not leaving that color on the walls

which is why these paint chips came home from the hardware store and they are on the carpet in there so I can pick a very pale color to paint it

I'd like to get this done in the next week or so then get this room "staged" and move on to the next one

not really my favorite thing to do all the way around, so I'm trying to think about the creative side of the project

oh yeah, a lot of that "stuff" in this room is going to be going to eBay, so I'll be putting up notices about that here, just in case you might want some of the goodies that are stashed here