Tag Archives: procrastination

Mar3

Apparently I lied

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Yeah, remember when I said I’d be posting again soon? Two months ago? Um.

I also may have said I was high class, but that was just a lie.

I’ve been in a bit of a funk that I keep thinking is going to waft away like the smell when you drive past the water treatment plant, and it hasn’t quite gone away. Maybe I need to be detailed.

I’m especially disgusted with myself this weekend, since I really need to get started on an art project that has an actual deadline. I got juried into the Habitat for Humanity ReStore art show, and I’m planning to work on a piece that I’ve had in my head for at least a year. (Oh by the way, this blog marked its 1-year anniversary last month. Apparently without me.) Some procrastination was actually helpful, as I’d been about to start with the basic piece my collage/assemblage will be made from, and thought I was going to have to use a plan B piece. But a friend turned up with what I wanted all along, which is a window of the size that falls within the guidelines of the show. So yay. But it’s way past time I got started, and there will be some weekends I can’t work on it, so I’ve just painted myself into a corner where I’ll have to be working on it before and/or after work.

And dammit, I don’t know where my box of ephemera has gotten to. How very ephemeral.

And as a side effect of getting Plan A materials, I thought of something really cool to do with the plan B piece, a pallet.

So that’s where I am at the moment. I will keep track of the progress of this piece and eventually show it here. I’ve got a month, so it won’t be terribly long.

Oh! Yeah! I got into the show using photos I snagged from this very blog. Wooooo!

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Jan2

Happy new year—and more dangerous crafts to come!

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Nope, not dead yet.

I have been organizing my kitchen, a heroic endeavor, which is not only taking place at the expense of my crafting, but the entire rest of my house. Sigh. Organizing really does suck the creative life out of me. Or maybe it is a creative pursuit, but a whole different type. I’ve had to do a lot of thinking about where things should go in a way that makes sense with what kitchen things I need where. It’s incredibly slow, and has involved spending a lot of time with my kitchen looking absolutely horrible while everything was pulled out. So that’s why the radio silence.

However, I have a project in mind that dovetails with making a nice little room for a new cat I’m hoping to adopt. We’re having a trial weekend coming up this weekend (if the weather stays good), so I need to be ready to keep him separate from my cat. So I’ll need to keep them from spotting one another through the French doors that lead to the room. I have what I hope is a clever idea, so stay tuned….

And soon I hope to get back to my stash of craft goodies and make something awesome. I have some new materials and some ideas (including something that goes with that kitchen reorganization), I just need to get the time (or to have some energy when I have the time, which has been an issue).

So, in short, I’m behind but I’m not through by any means.

Oct10

Hitting the fan

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Believe it or not, I am not projectless, just fairly wordless. Spent one weekend away, then every night and half of last weekend madly writing a story that turned out to be an epic. I opened windows several times to post, then just stared at blank screen.

The weekend away was at a gathering of fans in a nearby city. If you think ComicCon or DragonCon, you are WAY off-base. There were fewer than 20 of us, but we had a fantastic time. And luckily one of the activities was the making of a bracelet themed around the CW show “Supernatural.” Profound exhaustion precludes me from getting off my ass to photograph the bracelet, but I’ll do so within the next couple of days.

At any rate, this weekend I encountered a cool multi-fandom craft challenge to make something related to the object of one’s fannish obsession. Anyone reading this who wishes to check it out (either to sign up or to bookmark to check out the resulting crafts) can go here: http://imadeathing.dreamwidth.org/332.html
There are prompts you can choose, but it’s pretty loosey-goosey and you can just use it as general inspiration with a deadline if that’s what it takes to get you moving.

And speaking of fandom and craftiness, GISHWHES is returning this year to haunt us again. Actor Misha Collins and cronies create a list of bizarre things to make, do, document, and send his fans forth to accomplish them. I suspect my craft rate will go way up, but I probably won’t be able to show off what I’ve done until the competition is over.

Aug11

Those days when your eyeballs hurt

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Somehow my full day of housecleaning evolved into me goofing off all day and getting a sunburn and a migraine and then goofing off some more. Which is unfortunate, since I invited a friend over for tomorrow, and she’s never seen my place.

It started out innocently enough. I had a couple of things to take to the flea market stall I rent, and when I got there I realized that ermagerd! the outdoor flea market is this weekend. And of course I had to make the rounds, where I did score some epic crafting type stuff. Oldish yardsticks with advertising for $2, $3 and $4. Shutters for $5 each. A couple of pairs of jeans for $1 each, which I got mostly to be nice after I picked some stuff out of the same people’s free bin. (Including some awesome, though completely broken down, cowboy boots, which I plan to alter like mad.) Oh, and a wheelie bin that’s probably meant for gardening but will be good for schlepping things down to the basement via the hill outside and not the stairs. Also chatted with some people and enjoyed that thoroughly. Though it was a beautiful day and not too hot, I got a little fried, and after I came home and put stuff in the garage, I sat down to catch up with a friend on the phone and cool down, and by the time we’d talked for 1 1/2 hours, I was reeling a bit from not having had lunch. By the time I finished eating, a migraine had set in already, and so I napped a while, and then have mostly lounged and eaten ice cream.

I am partway through a craft that’s a bit of a quick one, and maybe it’ll be postable tomorrow at some point when I’m not madly grabbing up things and hiding them somewhere, or hanging out with my friend.

Aug5

Craft dinner

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I have no idea what that subject line relates to. Crafts. I have none.

That’s about 50% busy-ness, 50% sloth. After a mid-day thunderstorm yesterday, today was an absolute gem of a day, about 75 degrees and sunny with some fluffy clouds. I had a friend in town all weekend, so today we went out and wandered around the indoor flea market. (And I continued my run of selling stuff even when I didn’t think I had, and more than making the rent on my space.) I found some craft and home DIY items there, and then we went to an outlet store and I got an oversized shirt to try a craft project on, 2 books that will provide excellent fodder for some fiction, and a car organizer thingie. We ate a late lunch and then we parted so she could head home. Came back kinda knackered, so I haven’t done much but read and have a phone convo with my brother.

I know exactly what it is I want to do, I just haven’t given myself the push to do it. Hope to have something done by tomorrow if I can light a fire.

Work week is going to feel long. My coworker is on vacation all week. Making something will really improve things, so I need to get my head in the right place.

(Jeez, this wasn’t even entertaining….)

Jul2
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Well, I’m still not feeling the burning desire for documentation. That’s just wrong!

It’s horribly, horribly hot (though not as hot as elsewhere), and I came home to melt onto the sofa, have dinner, and work on writing a story that needs to be finished and looked over by a beta reader by Sunday. I took a long break from fiction writing, and the first attempts were a little dead, but I’m sliding back into the groove a bit. Now it is ten and I don’t feel like wielding the camera.

This heat just does not agree with me, and it’s going to be sticking around for at least the next few days.

Anyway, I’m gonna get on that tomorrow.

I need to get my motivation working: Did Julie Powell shirk her aspic? Did Jonathan Coulton find himself Thingless during Thing of the Week?

Well, actually, I have a thing. I just am lacking motivation to prove it.

Promises, promises

Jun10

Funkytown

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Maybe I can say something insightful about art funk today. I’m not altogether sure it won’t wind up in full grousing mode like I did last night, though. (See post that I locked down. Except you can’t. You’re welcome.)

What is it about human nature that there are times you know that doing something — like making things, or taking a walk, or making something fresh and homemade to eat — will make you feel better, but you don’t? Or not doing something — like eating that second giant bowl of ice cream, getting into a Twitter pissing match, or reading comments on any news story pretty much anywhere on the internet — but you do?

Me either.

I really need and want to engage more fully with art projects throughout the week rather than half-ass them at the end — which I’m not doing all the time, mind you, but I have been putting off the multi-day projects and new skills to some degree and doing something quick or finishing up a project I’ve been inching along with. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’d love to get engaged in something I can’t wait to come home to every night — and then have the energy to do something with it when I do get home.

Work is long hours plus a long commute these days, and lately it has been feeling thankless. It’s hard to hold onto the creative spark under those conditions, when all I want to do is eat dinner and zone out, and on weekends I also feel I should be cleaning All The Things or I have social plans.

I don’t know if this post is insightful or not. Not especially, that’s my suspicion. And not funny or entertaining either, which is worse.

But there you go.

I do have a project in mind, so I’ll be back later.

Jun3

I am in a funk and I cannot find my Velcro[TM]

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Tis totally beyond me why I should have a massive case of the blues today, but I do. Perhaps because I pinned a bunch of hopes on having lots of things done this weekend, and next to none of them were done (note the impressive use of passive tense in that last phrase). I need a day or two where I can get a massive running start on doing things I don’t necessarily want to do. If there’s somewhere I need to be in the middle of the day, it pretty much ensures I won’t get anything done before, and I’m not so likely to do so after, either. (Note lack of agency implied by phrasing here, too.)

Yesterday I did some volunteering that completely sucked dry any social energy I had. I’ve long thought of myself as shy, but as I’ve gotten older I think it’s more that I have a finite amount of social energy. In small groups or one-on-one, I can go for quite some time, but big parties where I don’t know many people deplete that energy faster, and going from one thing to another can mean I don’t get the recharge I need. So last weekend I was at Wiscon, where I did tons of socializing (though not as much as in previous years, as the art show prep kinda wore me out), and then I slammed right into the work week, then Saturday I made phone calls for a get-out-the-vote drive. This is completely outside my comfort zone. Three hours of that was enough to send me home to bed at 4 pm instead of to the party I’d been planning to hit. I told the campaign volunteers it wasn’t in my comfort zone, and they were awesome to coddle me and ply me with sweets and say I was doing great. Still, I think I’d rather have a root canal.

It’s interesting, considering Friday I did another volunteering gig, my Meals on Wheels run for the season (we have enough volunteers I don’t get to do more than 1 or 2 runs per season). I was having a morning that, to say the least, lacked in awesomeness, but I was looking forward to the meal deliveries. There you’re knocking on doors, but people are so glad to see you and the smiles you get are so genuine. It makes me happy that I am contributing to older people being able to live on their own, and to know someone checks on them every day (or nearly so). I don’t know if it gave me energy, but it gave me a mood lift, which I needed.

This doesn’t have much to do with creativity, except why I’m just thinking about getting started on something crafty. And I have no idea where my Velcro[TM] is. There was going to be a massive amount of clearing off spaces and organizing and decluttering, but I’ve been spending time with my funk and my laptop most of the day. I did go to a graduation party for an hour or so this morning, and did see the friends who tend to energize me, but I came back to sporadic fits of dishwasher loading, bill paying and piddling away the afternoon online.

I do have a project that’s a hair away from being finished, so I’ll get to it as soon as the cat gets off my arms. Just needed to talk about this energy stuff.

May5
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Oy, I’ve managed to do such a small percentage of what I planned so far today. Though I did use the new rug cleaner I bought on half the living room carpet (which is what I planned). Tomorrow I’ll move all the furniture over to the dry part and do the rest.

Otherwise, the billion bits of crafting did not happen, not so much. An attempt to make business card holders of copper wire to use in the pegboard display I’ll have at the Wiscon art show. Not sure how well they will work out.

No wait! I did the bleaching thing on some t-shirts and a tote bag I intend to make into the galaxy thing. I should go rescue them from the washer now.

Professional Crastination

Mar10

So that happened…

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So that happened…

Zombie cake is not relevant to this post, but it was made by me.

I seem to have rented a booth at a permanent flea market.

Well, it’s a local store in the midst of changing from dollar store-type merch to indoor flea market, and I’ve put my app in for a small booth when they’ve finally cleared the space for the second room. It might be something I’d move crafts into eventually but for now I’d love to get rid of some of the furniture that’s jamming my garage. I’ve got kitchen gadgets I bought in a fit of ambition that I’ve never or rarely used, too.

Reasonable rent, no yearly contract, no requirement to sit and hang over my stuff at all, and the advertising’s all taken care of.

Woo hoo!