Bah Humbugging as a Sport

Is it just me?  Everyone on the roads and in all of the shops seem to be less than courteous or even civilized these days.  The holidays used to bring out the best in many people, but these days it seems to bring out the worst.  While running errands yesterday, I can say with all confidence that I felt like the only person left on planet Earth that used the words, "Excuse me" or "Pardon me."  Seriously.  After one errand, I encountered a family with elders, one of which was clearly experiencing a medical emergency.  I called for help and stayed until help arrived, offering my cell phone for their use while we waited for paramedics.  How sad that they seemed surprised to receive help!  I spent the rest of the day in holiday traffic, letting bedraggled shoppers trying desperately to get out of parking lots and into the clogged roads go ahead of me, hoping they'll pass it on and be kinder on the road.

Today I am going to be busy shopping for holiday meals, wrapping gifts and enjoying holiday music playing loudly.  I may even bake some cookies (or buy some and smear flour on my face to make it look like I did again :-)  There's got to be at least one house in the neighborhood where the occupants aren't trying to perfect their bah humbugging skills.  No art, but lots of time on mom duty.

The Legs Have No Bird

My lovely husband is coming home after a week in China and I decided I should really do a little more deeper cleaning than usual to perk him up when he walks in the door.  If I run out of time, I may employ the trick of spilling and spraying cleaning products all over the place to make it smell brilliantly spotless, regardless what it looks like.  Boys are dumb and it has worked in the past.  Bahaha!  It's like tossing flour on your face and spilling some on the counter to make it look like you slaved over dinner ;-)

So the bird legs still sit on my artsy desk with no bird, but the cat's bathroom is free of litter all over the floor and I've vacuumed an entire school of Goldfish crackers from the living room floor.  Sigh.  Such is the life of a mom trying to be an artist.  There was yet another battle for the crackers, with two "kids," aged almost 17 and 26, running around the house, screaming and laughing and stealing the gigantic box of crackers from each other, applying graffiti in an effort to "tag" the carton as their own.  It was the silliest thing that I ever thought (the key word, thought) I got on video.  There's always that darned little button I forget to press sometimes....

Gotta Love Pavlov

Yesterday I actually managed to get some artwork done!  OK, I'm not sure if it qualifies as art if I'm using a pattern.  The intensity of focus is something I've missed.  It takes much longer to turn two pieces of floral wire and a bunch of ridiculously sticky floral tape into bird legs than I had anticipated.  It's a good thing I had the garage door closed (it was freezing and I had my little space heater zooming) because I think I had my tongue sticking out to one side, clearly aiding me in my bird-leg making efforts, as I focused on how to make proper legs with too-short wire.  It would have been embarrassing to have been spotted by the neighbors looking like that.  In any event, I enjoyed plowing through my stash of fabric and finding the perfect trio for the project.  Not everything from the indoor studio has made it to the garage studio, so I found myself muttering a few choice words under my breath each and every time I realized that something I needed was in the house.  Did I mention that it was pouring rain?  And that there is no path from the garage to the house free of said rain?

Today I had hoped to clean up for a while (my children are savages) and then move on to the next stage of bird making.  There were a multitude of distractions - the charming Egyptian gentleman that lives around the corner feels compelled to come to the door and share a bit of his religious beliefs with me in exchange for letting him pick all of the oranges he wants.  Does one get assigned a special place in you-know-where when one ducks and hides after hearing his car pull up?  I just wanted to get some art work done!

Then I found myself having to actually holster an air horn (ok, I don't have an actual holster; the front pocket of my jeans served me well).  One of my two cats has discovered the kitty version of carpet sliders.  Carpet sliders are the most magnificent invention for boys named Kevin with carpeted homes.  They are made of flat pieces of plastic with velcro straps and are worn like very unattractive shoes, then the boy runs and stops so as to skid across the carpeting.  Sox, the deviant cat, started in the living room and absolutely bolted across the house, leaping to the dining room table that is complete with a lovely red holiday tablecloth.  He was sliding at great speed, and I actually watched him spin like an ice skater, making horrible scratches with his back claws in the wood.  I lost my mind, yelled, blasted the air horn and watched him bolt.  Hiding behind the sofa while I returned the tablecloth to its proper state, that rotten cat waited until I left the room, wound himself up and did it again.  And again.  And again.  There has been a lot of hollering, blasting of the air horn, and a cat doing a good impression of Fred Flintstone.  In order to save the dining room table, I've propped the air horn in the middle of it.  Pavlov had it right.  So far, so good.

But no progress on the bird or the art journal.  Without any kids home for more than an hour, I'm going to try to get something done.

Stupid cat.

P.S.  The air horn works great for arguing kids.  It's a most glorious Mom tool.  :-)

Stepping Out

Moving the studio to the garage has been a mixed bag for me.  It's often noisy, and it's a serious pain in the patootie to have to shut down the big door for security purposes every time I have to go into the house to retrieve something.  My books are still in the house and, after the little puddle of water I saw inside the garage door after the sprinklers ran, I think the books are going to stay indoors.  I will say that the inconvenience does keep me from over-referencing books! 

Stepping out of the house and away from the hustle and bustle with kids, cats, televisions and phones does have its perks.  I have actually begun to make headway on my art journal.  I feel a little flummoxed by the project (am I ever happy with my own work?) but have plodded along a bit with my iTunes going on the laptop.

Today I stepped a little more out of my comfort zone and signed up for an online class with artist Susan Sorrell.  An article about her appeared in a magazine I purchased about a year ago and I must admit to returning to the article and loving the photos time and time again.  Her artwork is fun, colourful and engages a lot of the skills that I've not used for a long time such as applying embroidery and beading and applying them to fabric collage.  How exciting!

In the meantime, I continue to try to do a little something every day in my new art cave.  We'll see what I can accomplish today before the rain starts.   I've got this much done - the journal stitched, the pages painted and the first few bits of paper collage started, all with the glare of the light coming in from the garage door windows.  Whoops!

Another Day...Little Done

I had the joy (sarcasm alert) of spending the morning at the doctor's office getting an over-due peek-a-boo-oscopy.  For once I felt like the practitioner was listening to me!  I'm sure this is TMI, but several years ago I had bilateral breast reduction surgery in an effort to qualm the never ending migraine headaches.  It was a miracle!  I haven't had one since.  However, I was left with what has yet to be identified, initially thought to be a hematoma near an incision site.  Eleven years later, it's still there and I think it's bigger.  I've expressed concern to several physicians over the years, and they've all blown it off telling me it was probably scar tissue.  Probably?  Really?  We're going to guess, cross our fingers and swing chickens and hope for the best?  So the mammogram scheduled for today was cancelled and, instead, I was referred to the breast clinic at the hospital.  I'm not going to fret, but just plug along taking control of health issues as they arise.  I've lost 42 lbs. (with a good chunk still to go) and I'm working out HARD several days a week trying to improve my health.  Needless to say, the elliptical isn't in the studio, so guess what I'm NOT getting done.  Sigh.

Today I decided that I won't get any art done, but I will get my son to the sports shop to order his Letterman jacket, having lettered in marching band, and get the house really tidy so that tomorrow I can focus on art for the entire day.  I am committing to looking away from any "how to" book or magazine article and just play, going to the next step on my art journal.  The Mom job is certainly taking a front seat these days. 

Wish me luck.

Delays and Distraction

It's almost 2:30 p.m. and I haven't accomplished much today.  I did work out for an hour and a half, distressed that I still have a muffin top.  Well, more than a muffin top, but I continue to hope that some miracle will occur and I'll get off of the elliptical thinner than when I got on the beast.  I need one of those trick mirrors like the ones in the dressing room at Nordstrom.  The dresses always look great during the trying-on phase, then my picture is taken at an event wearing said dress and somehow the camera added 30 pounds and a puffier muffin.  Ugh.  There are no skivvies tight enough.

I'm distracted by the holidays.  I love the holidays, but it's hard to focus on anything like art and impossible to catch up on housework.  The loss of my studio to my "boomerang" daughter also means the loss of the sacred hiding place for Christmas gifts as they are delivered.  This year, most of the gifts are larger than one can shove under a bed or hide in a shared closet.  As long as we're still fetching the mountains of holiday decorations from the garage, that isn't exactly a safe haven either.  It's good that no one in our family wants their holiday surprise spoiled, so no one is hunting or snooping.  Maybe the best thing is to find time to wrap gifts, a specific paper for each recipient so that I can avoid tell-tale name tags, and "hide" them under a blanketed table in the pseudo-studio, aka the garage.

My distractability has caused more than a pause in being creative.  I'm so glad I turned down the request to paint a cradle (for free, no less).  Now and again when I find myself in the garage, I also find myself sitting at the desk and slopping a little more paint on my art journal.  I had hoped to finish the collage part by last week but, alas, have been constantly distracted and hit snags in the schedule.  My goal today - get in there as soon as the yard dudes are finished blowing dirt all over the front of my house and collage just one page!  I need to make something.

Loneliness Stinks

Three and half years have passed since I left a fabulous job at the hospital to be a stay-at-home mom and artist.  In that time, I've done too little.  Worse, I've lost nearly all human contact and, for whatever reason, am really struggling with that issue this week.  The holidays are always fun in our home, though sparsely attended.  Usually the table is set for just my husband and, if I'm lucky, both of my kids are present and accounted for.  We play goofy board games, watch seasonal movies and just have a lot of fun goofing off.  Last year I turned 50 and that meant a MOB at the table, with family flying in from all corners of the country.  What fun!  But my in-laws live hundreds of miles and many states away, and my sister lives across the country and the economic environment has put quite the damper on travel for everyone.  Sigh.

So what do I do?  I feel like I did in high school.  Frequently the new kid (many times as I was a military brat), I would watch clusters of friends that had known each other for years, and I just couldn't seem to wiggle my way into the crowd.  What would it have been like to go to school with the same kids for more than three years?  I'm very outgoing and have a lot of fun talking with people, so it isn't a matter of being shy.  My husband's staff insist that I, "the party," am included in their office lunches so that they spend the hour (plus) goofing and laughing, so it's not that I'm dull.  And contrary to the tone of my blog, my spill-my-guts place, I'm quite the goof in person.  So what is it?!?  I just always feel like the odd girl out.  I have no artsy or craftsy friends locally, as I've fussed about before.  They've got to be out there somewhere.  I'm losing my sanity being alone so much, holding full-fledged conversations with cats.  THAT is the true sign of insanity.

While I've joked about placing an advertisement in the "Want" ads for artsy friends, there's a part of me that is thinking there's got to be a way to do such a thing.  Where do I begin?

Here kitty, kitty, kitty.  I need a chat.