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I recently had a job shift and have been working more hours and earlier in the day than I have been for a while. I find it interesting that when I was younger, I could work a 50-60 hour week, sleep until 10:00 on Saturday, and be good to go, all the while staying up until midnight all week long and getting up at 6:30 am for work.

Now, not so much. I still get up about 6:30, but I find myself drifting off about 10:00 pm and this morning - Saturday - when I intended to sleep until 8:00 or 9:00, my body said “Nope...it’s 6:00 am. You will now arise and be tired all day”. What’s up with that? I’m upping the caffeine so I can at least pretend I’m not tired.

I plan on doing some retail therapy at the local bookstore later. I need (well actually “need” is a bit of a misnomer), I actually want some kind of a small journal to jot down photography and art ideas. Since Saturday is really the only day I have time to indulge in any art activities of any kind now, I need to record my ideas when they occur to me and not have them living on random bits of paper in my purse or on my night stand where I’ve forgotten they exist.

I remember reading something in the distant past about how rigid Benjamin Franklin was with his daily schedule. The man certainly accomplished a lot of stuff, but the right-brained part of my personality really rebels at all this organizational effort. I have to be extremely organized at work, due to my type of employment, so when it comes to my creative life, I kind of want to relax about it, but I don’t have the luxury of randomly experimenting due to time constraints. So I figure if I get a little art idea journal, I can see on paper whatever my brain spits out, and just go with the most feasible ideas.

Does that make sense? Since my body won’t let me sleep in (it’s time for my second cup of coffee now) I’m just trying to figure out how to best take advantage of this betrayal by writing down my random thoughts about how to best organize my meager creative time.

I can also tell be re-reading this, I have definitely not had enough caffeine yet because it’s not that well organized, but I’m posting it anyway since I haven’t posted a blog for a while.

I just got a new phone because my old one was dying. It was a Blackberry and I miss my little keyboard, but everything is a trade-off. The new one is very nice. I’ve discovered scrabble in the game store and I’ve been playing it with my daughter-in-law and her mother. For some reason, that stupid little addictive game keeps giving me either the “j” and the “z” at the same time, or all vowels. I know it’s supposed to be random, but I swear it’s out to get me. On top of that, I can tell my daughter-in-law has been playing this for a while. I’ve played several games with her and I haven’t beaten her yet. She’s been killing me.

At any rate, I don’t know about you, but sometimes I swear the electronics in my life are out to get me. My work computer seems to be catching cold lately even though I don’t surf on it and I don’t open suspicious mail. My camera has been making odd noises lately when I’m using one particular lens on manual focus....I hope there’s nothing wrong with it.

I used to make fun of my son. Everything electronic he buys has a problem and he has to exchange it. I’m not kidding. When he was still living at home, we ordered him a computer for college and the first monitor had a purple screen. We sent it back, and the second one came with a broken case. We sent that one back and UPS lost it. The credit card company only credited us for one of the monitors so we ended up paying for two. He bought himself a printer at a local electronics store and it didn’t work - he had to exchange it. When he got his first apartment, he bought a bread maker that didn’t work and he had to exchange that. Recently, he bought his wife an i-phone and the screen didn’t work, so they had to exchange it. There have been several more things I can’t think of right now.

Before my father passed away in May last year, I had been thinking about getting a new computer, so before my son came out for the funeral, he bought it for me in New Hampshire because he didn’t have to pay sales tax. I told him to make a point of telling the sales person it was for his mother, not for himself. Fortunately, it seems to work fine.

They say you can affect the things around you by the energy you give off. I guess I influence the letter generator in the scrabble game and my son influences everything electronic around him. Is that weird? Or am I just imagining things? I know you know what I’m talking about. Everyone has their odd “thing”. I swear my mother-in-law used to buy three scratch-off lottery tickets at a time and win on two of them. Every time. I never saw anything like it. I once saw her go to the drug store across the street about 5 times, exchanging winning tickets for more tickets until she won 25 bucks, at which point she stopped.

Ah, well, perhaps if I concentrate some energy on it, that little scrabble game will stop giving me the darn “j” and the darn “z” on the same turn.

I have small art journals that I started in about 2003 because I simply had no time to paint any more. I started art journals and I got much more serious about photography.

These small art journals were my art outlet because when you’re working 50-60 hours a week, there really is no time to do traditional oil paintings. These little art journals have 100 sheets and I use both sides, so that’s 200 images per journal. It took me about 5 years to completely fill the first one and about 3 years to fill the second one. I started the third one in June of 2009 and I have 29 sheets left.

Yesterday, I was feeling down and restless. I didn’t know where to go or what to do, so I finally pulled out my current little art journal and my Berol colored pencils and my drawing pens and just started drawing. It felt really good. I haven’t been drawing much, but now that it’s really cold and with holiday obligations, I have not had much of a chance to go out with the camera for the last week or so. I got out the drawing journal out of frustration.

Getting caught up in what I feel might sell, marketing my work (which I still have not figured out how to do) and trying to please everyone else has made me realize I’m not happy with what I’m creating. Oh, don’t get me wrong, when the weather conditions are right, and I have the time, my principal love is still photography, but I have been drawing all my life and I think one of the reasons I’ve felt really unbalanced and unhappy is the fact that I HAVEN’T BEEN DRAWING. It’s a necessary part of my life, like food. I need it to stay healthy. Recently, I started playing around with making some purely digital art and I like it, but the minute I start making marks on paper, it really feels like “coming home”.

I have three blank journals after I finish the current one, so it’s not like I have to go out and get the supplies. I’m searching for more balance, and when I pulled out that little journal yesterday, I think I found a way to get there.

Here’s to a new year and lots and lots of images. Do your thing, whatever form of art it is. Write that novel, make that sculpture, arrange those pixels....but like they say in the Nike commercial, “Just do it”.

Happy creative new year to everyone!

I wrote previously about some of my obsessions - finding a perfect pen, books, yarn, and my personal favorite - Lays potato chips.

Lately, I see a pattern emerging as a response to general life stress. An obsession with food in general and images here and on other web sties. The images obsession is a need to constantly troll the FAA web site to see what other people are posting and to admire a lot of great images, especially by my watch-list members. Unfortunately, I’m “watching” so many people here, I’m missing a lot of what they are posting. Later today, I may click on each one of them and see what they’ve been up to, although that could take hours.

I have also been commenting on a lot of work lately that I truly enjoy. I’m not doing it to get comments on my own work, although that’s always nice, but to express my true appreciation for what I consider to be a good image when I see it. I’m constantly scrolling through “today’s new uploads” and occasionally there’s a gem of an image that leads me to look at someone’s work of whom I was previously unaware.

I’m wondering, at what point does this become obsessive? I mean, if we are posting work here constantly and always looking to paint, sculpt, photograph something amazing, we’re already hooked, but I’m finding it hard lately to turn off the computer.

I hesitate to be this way - I can’t imagine what would happen if I could no longer afford internet service. Would I be at the library obsessively searching for images, sitting in the same corner every day like the unfortunate homeless person who comes in just to get warm?

I imagine this obsession is a backlash in response to having to live in a left-brained environment where I have to deal with everyday practical stuff, and for about a year, a lot of it has been unusually unpleasant. Shifting over to the right, non-verbal, non-logical side of my brain and viewing or making images shuts off all the unpleasantness and feels normal, restful, quiet.

The food thing - well, when I’m occupying the right side of my brain, it’s really easy to unconsciously munch on the stuff in the bowl next to me. I have to cut that out. Even the bowl of raw carrots with blue cheese dressing can be a problem when you’re eating them just to eat.

Ah, life. So hard to balance....I keep trying.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve posted a blog entry. During that time I’ve written at least three blog entries and when I read them, I thought “wow, that’s lame - nobody would find that interesting”. Right now I can’t even remember what they were about, and if I can’t remember even though I wrote them, they must have been pretty forgettable.

So here I sit on a Sunday morning trying to come up with something to write about, and it comes down to what I’ve been struggling with lately. What to get rid of and what to keep.

I’m finding it amusing (sort of) that I chose to keep certain items from my parent’s house simple because they were unopened. For example, I found a jig-saw puzzle in a Chinese take-out carton which I thought was kind of clever, so I kept it. It’s not a problem if you only keep one or two things like that, but when you save everything in a hoarder’s house simply because it’s unopened, it can become a little ridiculous.

When we moved into our current home 20 years ago, the cheap chandelier in my dining room worked fine. It has six hanging glass bulb holders. Over the course of the 20 years we have lived here, the sockets for the bulbs have stopped working one by one and yesterday it died completely. I need to go buy another fixture today and have someone install it during the week. I found myself thinking earlier that I could save the glass bulb covers and use them in some abstract photos.

How much stuff do we keep in the name of “I’ll use this later in my artwork”? I have a few piles of magazines that I intend to canabalize later for collage images. I have two, two-volume sets of the history of art by two different authors because (and this is my mind set) they each write from a different perspective and you can get a better sense of an art movement’s place in history if you read about it from two different authors.

I have about 20 empty photo albums still in the shrink wrap, even though I hardly ever print any images any more. How much of this stuff do I really need?

I’ve already gotten rid of about 200 books, and I intend to get rid of some more. I also intend to get rid of a few things like the giant turkey cutting board in my kitchen because the family has dwindled way down, thus the need for only small turkeys, roasted in disposable pans.

I think I finally got rid of the complete works of Moliere in the original French that I read in college, but I’m not sure - it might still be lurking in a closet somewhere. I still have my son’s old keyboard he got when he was about 10 (he’s almost 37 now) that he doesn’t want and which is missing an octave, even though I now own my parent’s piano. I think the keyboard can go. It’s not worth anything, but I hate throwing stuff like that in the trash. I could go on, but I don’t even remember all the stuff hidden away in the closets and the attic.

I’ve had glimpses of other people’s collecting habits in some of the discussion threads - some confessions of studios packed with certain items, the obsessive collection of certain things (I still buy marbles occasionally), and it gives me some comfort to know I’m not alone in my struggle to free myself from an attachment to THE STUFF.

My husband and I have been married 39 years. I think in all that time we’ve been to a movie about 10 times. Seriously, we’re not the movie-theater type. We usually rent or buy a really popular movie when it comes out on DVD. The only movies I remember seeing in the theater are “Alien”, “ET”, the first 3 Star Trek movies and “Panic in Needle Park” (a really dark, depressing Pacino movie). There may have been a couple more, but I can’t remember them right now.

There are some tv shows we enjoy, however, so we have collected the DVDs over time for shows like “The West Wing” and “Star Trek the Next Generation.” We are currently working our way through the original “CSI” series, and we decided to watch a couple on Friday night. We haven’t watched anything for a while because I was taking care of my father’s estate and was basically not in the mood.

Well, neither one of us is that technically savvy. We used to turn on the tv, which is hooked up to cable, switch it up a channel to receive the signal from the DVD player, and watch away. Friday, my husband opened the DVD remote and found that the batteries had actually leaked, so that remote is dead. I said “OK, we’ll just have to use the buttons on the player.” The regular TV remote died a long time ago, so we have been using the DVD remote and the cable remote until Friday, when we got down to the buttons on the DVD player and the cable remote. Do you think I can figure out how to get the DVD feed to work? None of the “tv/aux”, or “tv/cd” buttons on the cable remote seem to do anything even though they light up when I press them. Everything seems to still be hooked up and plugged in. I do admit, however, there is a massive amount of wiring behind my tv partly because there is also an old VCR hooked up that we never use, and my daughter has her game console hooked up as well, so it looks like black spaghetti back there, but every wire I follow is plugged into something.

When I brought my parent’s piano over to my house, I had to get rid of a large fish tank and the cabinet under it, which housed some photo albums and the directions for the tv, the DVD player and the tape player. I can’t remember where I put them and I can’t find them anywhere - not that I think they would help.

I’m at a loss. This isn’t rocket science. It does remind me of a time when my son was about 4 and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law came over to baby sit so my husband and I could go out, and they wanted to use the old, primitive tape deck we had at the time and they couldn’t figure out how to use it. I told them they should have asked our son. My sister-in-law looked at her husband and said “I TOLD you we should ask Michael”. I guess my brother-in-law didn’t believe a 4-year-old would know how to run the tape player.

Now my 4-year-old is 36 and I want him to tell me what’s going on with my DVD player. Unfortunately, he lives in another state.

Does anyone have a techno-savvy kid they can loan me for a few minutes? Like I said, this isn’t rocket science, but I’m feeling pretty stupid right now.

If you were to write a novel, what would you write about? I read murder mysteries and sci-fi novels (although I overdosed on Stephen King a long time ago), but I don’t think I could come up with a good plot. I’m not an expert on anything. I’m more of a Jack (or Jill) of all trades, so a how-to book is kind of out of the question.

I can occasionally write a decent poem but nobody buys poetry books - at least they don’t sell in bulk.

I’m having fantasies of writing a best-selling novel and getting off the job treadmill, but of course, it’s just a pipe dream and it would probably take me several years to write anyway, and at that point I’d be blind and arthritic and in a nursing home.

I’ve started a few novels. One plot involved a woman being studied at a university because she could levitate objects. I never got past chapter one and I don’t know where I put it anyway. Then I started to write an autobiography - BORING - and the parts that aren’t boring I wouldn’t want anyone to read anyway (plus I don’t want to embarrass my kids).

So I keep thinking, what on earth can I write a novel about? I’m willing to work hard at it. Really, I am, but I can’t come up with anything interesting. I also can’t help but think whatever I write would be a rehash of something I’ve already read and I would be sued for plagiarism and spend my blind-arthritic elderly years in bankruptcy and disgrace.

They say there are no new ideas. If someone can think of it, they already have. I would love to stumble on a brilliant idea, write it down and make a million. Something they could make into a movie. A transvestite vampire who sleeps in his coffin in a negligee, perhaps. Nah, it’s probably already been done. Maybe a novel about a serial killer baker who bakes little surprises from his victims into his pastry...that’s a thought. Time for a snack. No pastry, though. I’ll think about it a little longer. There has to be something catchy I can come up with....

I have, in the past 20 years of occupying my old house, had an intermittent mouse problem. Usually, we set traps and catch 1 – 3 mice in the span of a few days and we're mouse free for several months. About a month ago, I noticed the tell-tale signs of another guest, but I was too busy with stuff to do anything about it, so I was just careful to keep food put away and not leave anything appetizing sitting around. My suspicions were confirmed when I was making breakfast one morning, and a small brownish-gray streak dashed under my stove.

Now, I really hate killing anything, but you can't have mice in your house – it's not sanitary. My daughter, kind soul that she is, doesn't want me using any lethal or cruel traps, so she drove to the local hardware store and bought a cage trap, but she couldn't find one specifically for mice. This one is for voles and larger rodents, so we have been providing this mouse with a steady diet of peanut butter for the past week. He's too tiny to trip the mechanism and shut the doors. At least it kept him from leaving calling cards on my kitchen counter.

So this past weekend I went to another local store and bought a small plastic trap with a door that supposedly falls down when the mouse crawls into the back of the trap to eat the bait. Well, this thing is so sensitive that the little door drops down any time someone walks past it. Also, it doesn't seem to close completely, so the mouse can get his nose under the edge of the door and scurry out. This morning, the peanut butter is gone again.

I'm going to have to study this problem. There must be a trap out there that won't torture the creatures and actually works without breaking their necks or gluing their little feet in place or providing a horrible, painful death by slow poison, which means they would die someplace inaccessible anyway and rot in your house.

All I can say is this little fellow is probably feeling pretty healthy right now. He's had a steady diet of all-natural peanut butter for a week.

There must be a better mouse trap…

I have had a week to decompress from clearing out my father’s house after it sold. I still can’t remember everything I found and a lot of it is in bins in my kitchen waiting to go down to my basement for storage.

I did find an old wooden cigar box, and when I opened it, I found a piece of white tape on the lid with the name of a former neighbor with whom I grew up. I met her when I was five and she was three. She is the first person I took a photo of with my dad’s Brownie camera in our back yard 57 years ago. Her birthday is exactly one month after mine, so I sent her a newspaper clipping that my parents kept about her parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. I went to her mother’s funeral about 10 years ago. Her mother was my other “neighborhood mom”.

I have not kept in touch with this friend except for major life events but she sent me a loverly birthday card last month, and I just sent her the two dollars I got for the cigar box at the estate sale. I figured the two bucks would amuse her.

In the last 6 years, I’ve lost two brothers-in-law, a father-in-law, both parents and a very dear friend. I can’t help but think I’ve come through a life hurricane and my mind and body and spirit are weary. I am a healthy person - that is I rarely get colds or other illnesses - but you know stress can trigger worse things, so right now, I’m trying to decompress as much as possible so that doesn’t happen. My joints hurt from lack of exercise, and the thought of cleaning my house after the massive, massive purge of my father’s house just makes me cringe. I have kept my dishes washed and I’m cleaning the bathroom today, but otherwise the dust just sits on my furniture. It’s not going anywhere, so I’ll catch it later.

Yesterday, I printed some scanned artwork that I’ve been wanting to print out. Today is supposed to be rainy, so I may read or make some more art. Feeling kind of scattered but I know I won’t be getting any emergency phone calls from my father, which was a common occurrence when my parents got into their 90s, and my husband is off at a chess tournament and my daughter has plans later, so I’m left to come up with my own entertainment. I might tinker around on the piano I inherited, or maybe draw or read - I just don’t know. I’ve been bumping into walls lately with no clear focus, so I need to find something to concentrate on that will take my mind off all the flotsam and jetsam floating around in my brain, which is the debris left over by this life hurricane. I don’t want to spend another entire day starting at reruns.

I feel very rested after concentrating on making a piece of art. I think I may drag out the “collage box” - a box I made of images and different types of paper, and see what comes out of that. I will drag out the yoga mat and stretch my sore joints, and just get the most I can out of the day.

I’m done now except for some miscellaneous paperwork and two final utility bills. I sold my father’s house after a 3 1/2 month purge. I have bins and boxes in my kitchen waiting to go down to the basement.

I have been through the majority of my father’s slides, and I found some interesting stuff - views of the house where I grew up right after we first moved in in 1955, when I was 5 years old. The house was new construction and it had beautiful wood floors which were promptly all covered with carpeting. There was absolutely zero clutter in the house and it was sparsely furnished. There is a shot of my mother in her apron with the front door open like she is greeting someone. I have a scanner, so I’m going to have to use it pretty soon and get some of these slides on my computer.

Then there are the piles of old photo albums. I already emptied the newer photo albums and categorized the loose photos, wrapped them in paper and put them in a drawer, but I have a few really old albums with photos from the 30’s and 40’s that I have to decide what to do with. There are entire albums where I don’t recognize anyone and the photos are not labeled. I imagine I will throw some of those out.

Which brings me to the heavily cardboard-backed professional studio photographs from the 1920’s on forward. Some of these are beautiful photographs, professionally posed, taken in a studio in nice photo holders or heavy-duty cardboard photo albums. Not quite sure what to do with these. I have a 2nd cousin in Minnesota whose grandparents (my great uncle Alfred and his wife Clara) are pictured in what looks like a wedding portrait. I talked to this cousin on the phone shortly after my father passed away and I told him I would send him a copy of that photo, so I should get to that.

The fact is, I’m tired. It’s been an intense 4 months (my father died on May 2 - exactly 4 months ago tomorrow). The photos may have to wait for a few more weeks while I recover from the sorting, shifting, sifting, throwing and moving. I need to decompress for a while - try and get back to my own photography which had gone by the wayside the last few weeks. I’m also purging my house. No way am I leaving as much stuff for my kids as my dad left - except for the photos. I will be leaving lots of photos.