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This is how it starts: a piece of wood, a spiral, and a leftover part from a harmonica. You just put them all there on the table and then wait for some kind of genius to strike. I don’t know if genius has ever struck me, but I do end up making stuff. I’ll take what I can get!
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This is the start of an RBS, kids. A few pieces of standard 10-gauge electrical wire, stripped and bent into a few nifty shapes. Soon it will be so much more.
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Spades were trump. Ten of spades took it! I haven’t played euchre in probably nearly twenty years, and I could STILL muddle my way to victory just as poorly as I did back in college. Nice.
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‘Tis the season for trains. Here’s some of my amazingly crappy stop-action photography. I still like the train, though. Every kid should have a train under the tree at Christmas. Even my nieces like them, even if “they smell funny.”
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RAM chip, chord book. Totally related, right? Well they are, sort of. Here on the blog where we are all about creativity, it’s no surprise that both of these are linked to my creative growth. Well, that, and I ordered them both off the interwebz, if you need one more obscure way they’re related. I know the mail media link is a thrilling one, but let’s put that aside and look at the whole creative thing, since that’s pretty much why I write on here all the time.
The RAM I hope is going to be a huge help with my photo stuff. You’ve no doubt noticed that the photo posting has slowed until it seems as if it has stopped altogether. It has not, I assure you. I’ve still been taking photos (almost!) every day. I have all of them either on my hard drive or on my camera. However, processing all those photos gets ridiculously time consuming, particularly when I have over a hundred to go through and I want to switch back and forth among five or six of them and pick the best one. Right about the time I start doing that, the virtual memory in my lappy kicks on, and then everything…slows……..to……….a………….crawl. It can take me two hours just to pick through ten photos. Granted, I’m a perfectionist, but the slowosity of my hardware isn’t helping things any.
Enter my brother, who informs me that the whole slowness thing is caused by this virtual memory issue, and that if I got more RAM I could whip through dozens upon dozens of pictures as well as run iTunes, Word, and my web browser all at once and never have a hiccup. This sounds like more than a good deal to me, so I only kind of reluctantly shell out money I don’t really have to get this stuff which should perform what is really an invaluable function: that of making my creative efforts more easily accessible and enjoyable. This is pretty key stuff, as in the past I’ve hamstrung creative efforts by trying to get by with the minimum. Then I’ve been unhappy with the results, and then I’ve called the whole thing a failure. I’m pretty much done with working against myself these days, and I realize that my creative efforst are important enough and valuable enough that I actually DO deserve to spend money on them.
This sort of thing – purchasing the RAM – is the sort of side-effect that working toward a goal has. I didn’t set out to update my computer when I decided to take more pictures, it’s just something that has come with the territory. I didn’t set out to learn more about how my computer operates, but it happened. The same thing was the case with my outboard hard drive – just happened as a matter of course. It’s really interesting to see how all this stuff comes about when I pick up on something and go after it.
The same sort of thing has happened with my drawing stuff. I started with a handfull of pencils that a friend had given me. Now I have a whole box full that I’ve bought for myself. I also have a sketch book and some regular lead pencils for other types of drawing. I’ve been hanging out a lot more with a friend of mine, because she likes drawing. I’ve been noticing visual art more and taking a greater interest since I started drawing. There are some other projects in the works related to this subject, and I hope I’ll have some other developments to report on in the coming months. It looks like I’m going to learn matting and framing in the near future as well – not that I planned on that, it…just happened. I think there’s a trip to the art museum coming up as well related to “refilling the well” as the Artist’s Way puts it, and that will be an outgrowth of all this drawing stuff too.
The guitar chord book – well, that’s kind of obvious, now isn’t it? I…didn’t really plan on buying that, but they guy who is teaching me things, he said that’s the book he first used over forty years ago. I wanted to learn a few things, so I’m going to give this a shot. Working on guitar stuff has led me to listen to music differently and led to new conversations with new people. This interest was also responsible for my nephew getting a ukelele from me for his birthday this year, in a weird sort of related twist. The people who are being affected by my interests are not just me, which is a cool thing to note. (If my nephew ever ends up on Youtube singing Jason Mraz tunes, I’ll be sure to let you know.)
Now, off to work on some photos or guitar or whatever the heck else…
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Jem is working with me on all of these. She is actually saving the life of the one on the right, which I started and disliked greatly. It’s now looking pretty effing cool. She had to remind me, “Wait until it’s done.” Yeah…I knew that.
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My old boss gave these to me, handmade marbles. I don’t have a sculpture that will fit them…yet.
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There is this bucket of smithereens in my shop area. A bit before Christmas my 4-year-old nephew was down there looking at my rolling ball sculpture stuff. He saw this bucket and asked, “Uncle Tom, why are you saving those rocks?” I laughed, because, quite obviously, I was not saving them! They were trash, leftovers from a (de)construction project that dad had helped me with way back two or three years ago when we had made some work space for me in the basement. I mean, yeah, I’d had them for…several…years….but…..I……wasn’t………uh……..saving…………them.
I thought about it, and realized no traveling smithereen-removers were going to come to my home, knock on my door, and ask if they could remove any detritus from buckets that were definitely NOT being saved in work areas in my home. Little by little I will now begin putting portions of it into my trash on a weekly basis to get rid of it, because I am most definitely NOT saving it! It, um, just took a while to, you know, do stuff.
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