Since creating a star — even a little bitty one — was somewhat draining, I went back to creating planets in our solar system. Here they are (some of them, anyway).
I decided to give Mercury some color
Not the goddess of love, but the toxic gas version
Because it's OUR moon
Yeah, I said Pluto, dammit
Posted in Collections, Creative efforts
Tagged Jewelry-making, photos, planets, Sci-Fi, science
It's all about entitlement
This here is Trigger. At the moment he belongs to Kelso Mules in Murray, Kentucky. They were kind enough to let me borrow the picture and edit in the parking sign that my friend took a picture of in Austin. The minute I saw this picture of Trigger, I knew he was the one I wanted to star in my little comedy. I don’t know how many of those signs there are around Austin, or other places, but I think it would be great fun to hitch a nice looking mule like ol’ Trigger to every one of them.
Trigger is for sale, by the way, and the Kelso Mules folks have other nice mules for sale. I wish I could afford one. I might even ride it once in a while.
This should be fairly apparent. Both need regular attention. Sometimes you can get away with a certain amount of neglect, like if you have all potted cacti, and if your blog is well established and people are going to keep checking back even if you only write one or two articles a month — if the audience knows you’re good for that one or two articles every month. But you can never just forget about the whole deal. Plants don’t water themselves; they can’t turn on their own grow light, and a blog won’t write itself.
Low maintenance real plants
So much for the ridiculously obvious. Here’s a link to a site called 43folders. It’s about being more productive/creative. I thought at first that it was actually about folders — as in how to use 43 folders to organize one’s productive/creative efforts. And that it would answer my burning question — “Why 43?” But alas, my attention span is only so long, and after skimming a few articles and not seeing an obvious answer, I gave up.
It didn’t help that I couldn’t exactly remember the name correctly. I was thinking 47folders? or was it 48folders? It wasn’t until I went to the meeting about “scrumming things done” and somebody mentioned 43 folders and how you have 31 days and 12 months that I had that “duh moment.”(It used to be a “eureka moment” but nobody says “eureka” any more unless they’re talking about the town in California or the totally awesome show on the Syfy channel — which I still maintain is a lame-ass name.)
So I came home and counted out 43 folders from the box I got back when I thought I’d be doing more teaching, and I put numbers one through thirty-one and months January through December on the tabs. Now I have no excuse to lose paperwork and/or receipts. I just put the stuff in the numbered folders that correspond to what day of the month it is, then on the first of the next month I move everything into the month folder and start over again. I reckon I’ll need year folders, too, so I can keep stuff I need for taxes. But only seven. I swear I’m not going to come up in 2057 and still have folders full of junk from 2009, 2010, etc. The IRS says you only need to keep tax records for seven years, and, by golly, that’s good enough for me. Going through my dad’s desk after he died, I found all his tax returns going back to the 1960′s. Seriously.
For me to start using any system to get organized is a huge step. This system is so simple that I think even I can do it. It’ll just take a little effort to remember to put the stuff in the folders. They need regular attention. Like a houseplant. Or a blog.
Not real - always blooming
It’s been a while since I did a post with a bunch of pictures. Gee, that means I’ve actually been thinking up stuff to write — or just bugging out of the whole scene, like I did the last couple weeks. Well, I have a few pictures to share, and they’re pretty random, which is kind of fun in itself. Here goes…
How many zebras can you find?
Hey, somebody get me a brewski.
Everybody say "Awwww!"
I swear there was no cat in that yard...
…by any other name is still “makeshift.”
My favorite watch
So, I have this watch that my first (ex) husband gave me when I graduated from the local university way back in 19ahemmhem. It’s one of the few things he gave me that I still treasure — mainly because it’s one of the few things he gave me that he got right. What makes it unique these days is that I never have to buy a battery for it. It is a wind-up watch. And it is water resistant. I wore this watch the entire time I worked at the Fort Worth Zoo. It got wet; it got crunched into walls; it got soaked in Baygon; it got splattered with all manner of animal excrement. And it kept on ticking. It is, after all, a Timex.
However. It is a BITCH to find a replacement band for. And of course, I’ve gone through several replacement bands. I made the one in this photo from a dog collar. That’s right, a collar for a itty bitty doggie. I had to take it apart and cut a chunk off to make it small enough for my wrist, and I had to improvise a way to attach the watch to it because the collar was too thick to go through the pins. But thanks to my new handy dandy sewing machine and my natural ingenuity, I now have a very cool watchband with a nifty snap closure instead of a bunch of velcro (which wears out after a few years) or a buckle (with holes designed to aggravate — one is too tight, the next one is too loose. Arrrgh!)
There's even an AKC tag
Since I normally post something about an art project I’m working on every Friday, I’ll continue my “High Maintenance” thread this weekend or Monday.
I’ve been working on a portrait of a friend’s Doberman for the past few weeks — a black and tan dog on black paper. Should be simple, yes? But the light has to be optimal for this one — even more so than when I was working on the colocolo. The grays I’m using for the highlights are a lot more reflective than those brown shades I was using on the cat, so when the light is wrong, the picture goes crazy-looking. But I’m loving the way it’s turning out (even though the photos don’t do it justice).
This was after the first few days
Where I was yesterday
I used to wear some pretty outrageous earrings. Back when I had long hair. Wow, are those days ever gone. But sometimes I get to thinking that I should wear something in my ears once in a while, so the holes don’t close up. I had that thought again Saturday, as I was thinking about going down to see what the Texas Reds Festival was all about. I didn’t want to go to the trouble of scrounging up some earwires and head pins and putting some real earrings together (the thought of wearing something I already had didn’t enter my mind — I knew I didn’t have anything that would match the bracelet I was planning to wear); I thought, “I’ll just loop some bead stringing thread through the holes and hang some beads on the thread, tie some knots, and presto — earrings.” Ha!
I spent an hour wrestling with the thread, the beads, a mirror, and my poor ears. I was sweaty and aggravated by the time I was finished, and knew that with the heat outside already close to 90 degrees, I was not going to enjoy an afternoon in downtown Bryan as much as I had anticipated. Oh, well. Maybe next year. The bonus was that I have some ear “decorations” that I can wear for several weeks if I want. (And I’ll probably want to because working in a mirror is a pain in the ass. I’d hate to try to do this every day, even though they say practice makes perfect — I say piss on they.) There’s nothing pointy to poke me anywhere — just thread and some small beads that don’t even get in the way when I sleep. I may have discovered a whole new way to do jewelry. Using a needle threader to pull the thread through the holes was a stroke of genius, if I do say so myself. Check out the results. At first both ears had the same design — the one in my left ear. Now I have the artsy-fartsy one-ear-this-and-one-ear-that thing. ( I had to re-do the right side yesterday because after all the poking with needles and whatnot on Saturday, that earlobe was starting to get inflamed. Ouchy.)
One strand of thread, looped through and tied in back.
Two strands of thread over, under, and through
This is the third photo that I intended to put in what would be my “normal” Friday post about my recent creative efforts. Since I basically had it ready to go a day ahead of time, and then ran up against the issues with the new blog platform upgrade, I went ahead and published the other photos with my rant about WordPress (well, sort of a rant) yesterday.
Here’s the Weimaraner.
The Big Grey Dog
Here’s another view of the shirt I made. A closeup of the fabric detail and a closer look at the bracelets.
A closer look at the detail.
Making stuff like this is a little like electo-shock therapy — only less painful, I figure (not speaking from experience here). I just know it helps me unwind.
And I’m going to wear the shirt and one of the bracelets this evening when I go to the reception at the Brazos Valley Art Center where I have a couple of paintings entered in the Brazos Valley Art League member show. Ta. Ta.
It has been a while since I posted photos of my creative projects, so here is one I’ve finished recently.
The new shirt, with two bracelets.
My cousin, who has done a lot more sewing and clothing-making than I, helped me with the shirt, and I got to learn how to use her serger — what a cool machine.
I did finish the shirt in time to take it on my recent weekend trip to Houston. And even though it’s not a tee-shirt, it is actually cool and comfortable. Who’d've thought?
Here’s the technical dilemma. I’ve been driving computers for quite a few years, and I like them. I’ve mastered (at least to the level that I need at the moment) word processing programs, spreadsheets, web browsers, e-mail, and, to a certain extent, even databases. But I’m no expert. Even though I learned some basic HTML and CSS coding, that was a long time ago — ancient history by today’s blinding pace of change standards. So when something that is labeled as “automatic,” isn’t so much, and when an “upgrade” acts more like a “downgrade,” I’m just as much at sea as a rank amateur.
The WordPress blog platform that I run my blog on was just upgraded last week. I ran my “automatic” process, backing up the files and databases it told me to back up when it told me to. Then I went back to using it as usual. Strange things happened. Not as bad as what has happened to some of the people I’ve been reading about on the forum at WordPress.org, but stuff I noticed. Like I don’t have the handy little button that lets me toggle between the little editing window in the dashboard page and a full screen editing window — which is nice for doing on-site composing, etc. I also discovered that when I pasted text into the little editing window, it disappeared. Now, there are two ways to use the little editing window. The default is “Visual,” which looks like an ordinary notepad program and that’s how you use it. The other tab takes you to “HTML” where you can see, change, add, or eliminate the HTML tags. What I was having to do was click on the “HTML” tab to see what I had just pasted into the page. It was there, alright, with all the appropriate tags. And it showed up in my “Preview” window the way it would/should look when I published it. Weird.
I ran into another glitch when I tried to put two other photos into this post. Some of the code for one of the photos showed up on the blog page when I published. When I went back to the editor and deleted that line of code (because I thought maybe it was a duplicate) it messed up the padding around the photo, and the caption went away. More weird.
So I tried to find out if there was anything on the forums that would help. I’ve changed to the drab “Default” theme, although I was able to change the color of the header (and of course, what do I pick but grayscale — more drab), but that hasn’t resolved the problem on the admin side. I don’t do anything fancy on my site at the moment — don’t have a lot of plugins, gadgets, widgets, or gizmos to blame.
I reckon I could uninstall the upgrade and revert to the previous version, like some people on the forums have said they did — after their blogs vanished completely. Heavy sigh. I can imagine the buckets of sweat I’ll sweat over that operation. Or maybe I’ll just use this tired-looking old theme for a little while and see if they release a patch of some sort.
In the meantime, the other photos I wanted to post will just have to go into their own articles.
“It’s always something.” — Gilda Radner
Posted in Computer literacy, Creative efforts
Tagged blogging, learning curve, photos, sewing
