From the Artella Daily Muse

The Artella Daily Muse had this list of writing prompts. What would you like to know? I'll attempt to answer them at a later date. (I'm also a procastinator, hehe) (it's now later, Sunday morning 9/30/07)

They say "Fill in the blanks with your answers."

1. If time and money weren’t factors, I’d love to take a course in ___ceramics, oil painting, watercolours, interior designing, architecture, get an arts degree, ethnology, playing steel drums, mosiacs, computer programming_.

2. I’ve always wanted to ask (person you know)__my now gone grandmother _ about __her life__.

3. I’ve always wanted to know how ___weightless _ works (feels).

4. My life would improve if I could only ___win the lottery, be less of a procrastinator, sleep more ___.

5. When I have a sleepless night, it’s usually because I’m worried about _finances or I've had too much coffee__.

6. The worst injustice I can think of is __child and domestic abuse, world hunger__.

7. When I was a kid, I was really passionate about ___astronomy ___.

8. I have always been embarrassed to admit that __soap operas __really interest me.

9. In my life, I have overcome ______?_________.

10. If I could volunteer for just one cause, it would be __domestic abuse hotline ___.

11. I wish I were better at __my art, decision making, cooking, making friends___.

12. I have always wondered why ___child and domestic abuse exists_____.

What is your relationship with food?

That's the October 2008 Self-Portrait challenge. Here I'm eating a wonderful shrimp salad with vinagrette salad dressing while watching TV.

Later tonight Greg and I will go out for our usual Friday night dinner. It's something we both look forward to all week long. Friday nights are hard when you're dieting. "We" are dieting because I need to and he's doing it because he loves me and wants to experience what I'm going through. God, I love that man.

We are low carb dieting because it's the easiest one to follow. Once you go through the first week of phase one, all the cravings go away. Well most of them. You get to a place where you forget to eat until your stomach is crying for food. I love this diet because it easily translates into a great life style change. I'm such a carb addict that I literally and constantly crave breads, potatoes, sugar...it's all addicting to me.

Vintage men 102

Vintage men 102
Originally uploaded by dargie

I love this image. I'm going to use it in an art journal project "inspired" by Inspire me Thursday. I'll post the finished project later.

Self-portrait

I bought a book on creative ideas for art journaling and one was about self portraits. Here is one I took recently. These are my flintstone feet.
Anyway this is my first post through the mobile portal. I thought this might be a good way to get my art pics to the blog easily. Let's see how it works.

Where has the time gone?

I can't believe it been months since my last post. (oh, that sounds like I'm in a confessional) This year has been very busy, fun, emotional and stressful. I run the whole gamut of emotions from extreme happiness to sadness and everything in between.

My daughter got married in May in San Diego and had a reception in our home in June. The wedding was on the beach and was just beautiful. The reception was fun as well. My brother came to the reception as well as lots of people from my daughter and husbands work place. Then a few weeks after the wedding reception daughter and new husband informed us they were moving to New Mexico. What??? My baby moving three states away? I know they chose NM because that's the only other place she's liked and because there are other family members there. But my baby moving three states away? Once I got over the shock I volunteered to drive with her while new husband drove the moving van.

OMG what is it? W-h-a-t is that thing on the side of the road? Drive faster please, we need to get away. OK not necessary, that is one in a series of dinosaurs statues on the side of the road in eastern Arizona. I took as many pictures as I could as we were driving by them earlier this month. They are just too funny.

The trip to NM earlier this month was long but we got closer as a result. I stayed with them in their new apartment for a few days after we got there. They both got lucky in that they got jobs right away. She had a job lined up even before she got there and they loved her. (What's not to love, she's adorable and a hard worker when it doesn't involve housework. )

This new "empty nest" is very different and very quiet. I thought it would be easy to deal with but it's harder that I thought. Last night my husband had an evening managers meeting and didn't get home until 8:00 pm and it got lonely here. This house is entirely too big for us. When we bought it we thought our dear girl would be going to college in Sac but instead she moved out soon after we moved here, then she got married.

As far as my art, I'm working on two journals, and some ATC's. I'll upload some soon. The above image was a self-portrait taken during a long walk I took in August. The image below is from the same walk.

Stressful daze

I have been in a daze today because I tool some Tylonal PM to help me sleep last night. I got a large check yesterday for my mom from my fathers life insurance. Normally that would be cause for joy or relief but it isn't. It just means more stress. Mom's on medicaid and when they hear about the check, they are going to drop her like a hot potato....which means even more stress to get her back on when it's gone, which will be fairly quickly considering my father left some debt when he passed. sheesh it's all such a pain.

And if that's not enough, we have to go to NM to clean out their house to put it up for sale. And the only good thing about getting the check now is that Medicade also threatened to drop her if we put the house on the market. Not sold but on the market. So at least both will be happening at the same time. Selling that house is not going to be easy and if you'd seen the house you'd know why. We'll be there for the weekend and then drive the truck back....1100 miles....stress.


Enough....S_T_R_E_S_S..............

Now the good part of the day. I went to lunch with my daughter today. I was supposed to pick her up at work but she stayed home with a migraine. So I picked up some food and went to her apartment and we ate, talked and watched a movie. The Lake House. Not a great movie but not really bad either.

Happy Valentines day.....tomorrow.

A Friday in the life....

Today was a busy day with lots of tech calls to make. People were nice and easy to work with. That's not always the case. Some days I get people won't won't stop talking or they don't take direction well. I had a really nice woman who wanted some black and white graphics to use for her class handouts. I was able to give her some good ideas and she was very appreciative. Another woman who insisted that her links didn't work but when we spoke and she tried it, it did. hummm

It rained much of the day today. As much as we need the rain, I find it depressing. It's so gray and cold. All I wanted to do was sit in the bedroom and visit art websites on my laptop. Teesa Moore's site is one of my favorites. Atcards.com is another favorite. I spend a lot of time there looking through the gallery and looking for new swaps. I signed up for two swaps that sounded interesting but now can't get motivated to work on them. I have time so it's OK.

I wasn't completely lazy, I did get in some treadmill time just before lunch. A brisk 45 minute walk while watching a prerecorded episode of Y&R.

Greg and I went to dinner at Ruby Tuesdays earlier and I did not have a good dinner experience. We've eaten there many times before but I'd never ordered this particular item. It was a Carolina chicken salad (dieting remember?) and it was filled with lettuce, nuts, bacon and tomatoes, breaded chicken and cheese. While all that sounds good it wasn't. The lettuce stunk, it was some packaged lettuce that smelled like McDonalds lettuce. And the chicken was breaded with more breading than chicken....not a good choice for someone on a low carb diet. Of course the menu didn't say it was breaded. If the lettuce had been fresh, I could have eaten the chicken without the breading. But the smell from the lettuce was just too much. I couldn't take it. To the resturants credit, they didn't charge us for the salad. After we left the resturant we drove by Wendy's for a chicken Blt salad. Shoot, if I have to diet, the food should at least taste good. Dieting is hard enough otherwise.

Find creativity when & where you can

Monday night I couldn't sleep so I got out of bed and went to my office/studio to mess around. I tested the new watercolor crayons I bought a week ago. I colored and painted two ATC sized cards, then let them dry.

Once dry, I took my fine point pen and filled one with patterns. On the other I created a fantasy map of a made up area of this beautiful earth.





Yesterday I found out there is a new version of MS OneNote. I loved the original but it didn't do everything I wanted it to do. Mainly, the ability to create a webpage from a Note page.

This is a great way to create online lessons for my website but unless I can turn it into a webpage, it wasn't of much use to me. This version seems to be able to do just that but we'll see. I'm still testing and since MS gives you a 60 day trial, I'm not going to spend my money until those 60 days are up.

My Favorite Band - INXS plus other stuff

INXS is my favorite band. I really got into JD and INXS during RockStar:INXS. What a fun show that was. I found lots of new music to enjoy. Since then I've seen INXS twice in concert and I have a ticket to see them again in March. My husband is annoyed by my desire to see them in concert again. He went with me to the first two concerts and had a great time. But now he refuses to go again. That's OK, I'll go alone and I know I'll enjoy it.

I had some good news this morning. I started a diet last week and worked really hard on it all week long. 40 minute to 1 hour work outs and strict food intake...ie: a low carb diet. It paid off, I lost 7 lbs and food cravings. Yeah. I don't think I can do 20 more lbs before March 11 (INXS concert date) but I'm going to try the best I can. My actual goal is 20 lbs by May 1st. That's my baby girl's wedding day. Wedding day?...that's better left for another day.

I'll post more tomorrow as this was really supposed to be just a test post to see how Picassa added images to the blog. Very easy. Cool.

The birthday gift to my shoe loving daughter

When my girl was three years old, she took off all her clothes and just put on her daddies big old shoes. I think that must have been the beginning of her love affair with shoes. The girl loves not just any shoes but designer shoes. She turns up her nose at what she calls "cheap" shoes or what I like to call "affordable" shoes. For her 19th birthday I thought I'd make this little altered tin to honor her love of shoes and to hold a gift card for her favorite store.

The outside of the tin:

The tin was first sanded to rough up the surface so the tin would hold the copper paint. The first layer of paint I used was a combination of DecoArt's Bright Bronze Metal Paint and it's Coal Black Metal Paint. The second layer was simply a coat of the Bright Bronze. The image and the words were added using Modpodge on both the tin and the back and from of the image. This protects them from getting dirty when handled. The heart lock and key were added using gel medium.



The inside of the tin:

Before adding any elements, I drilled two tiny holes at the top center of the lid lip. These holes would later have wire run through them to hold bottom half of the torso, allowing it to swing freely. Both sides of the tin were covered in scrapbook paper using Mod Podge to secure it.

The tiny shoes and purse are made from shrink plastic and the aluminum $5 bill image came from some, now long gone, chocolate candy I got at World Market. They were glued in with Gel medium, because it's stronger than the Modge Podge. The quote "Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world." was added to the right side of the tin.

The torso image was found at a shoe website, printed, and cut out and backed with two layers of cardstock to stiffen it. I punched a tiny hole at the top of the image to run the wire through it. The wire was added first through the two holes at the top of the tin, then through the torso from the front to back. Then I twisted the two wires in the back so they couldn't be seen from the front. The torso was then twisted around twice to form a little "rope", for lack of a better word.

It was a last minute gift idea but it was fun to create.