so I was away for a while...

February and March plodded along until they just flew by... Yes, long time no blog. It was winter. It was Michigan. What can I say? I spent a lot of time in doors working on the in doors. My office / studio / living room underwent a slight cosmetic makeover. It is the room that I spend the bulk of my time in, so it was time for it to feel like a room that I wanted to spend most of my time in.

Before

After

It's the little things that make the biggest difference. I bought bookcases and assembled them so that I could move a lot of magazines and piles of paper and boxes of craft supplies out of the room. That alone made it feel like less of a glorified storage closet...
Then I started working on my desk. I have 2 of them. One of them had just become a place to set a printer and pile things... that was kind of silly. So, I moved a lot of stuff off my desk and better organized the things that needed to stay. And now I can actually sit there and draw - which was the desired result.

Plus, I framed and then hung many of my original drawings...

And then I got the chair...

It's one of those padded accent chairs. It's perfect. It's nice and low - the way I like my desk-to-chair ratio so that what I'm working on is close to eye level.

So, it's nice to have somewhere to sit and work without trying to balance a drawing board on my lap as my foot falls asleep.
Hopefully winter treated you well, and spring will eventually begin and stick around for a little while before we veer directly into 90˚F days of summer...

stuff...

I have a lot of stuff.

I know that. I've always had a lot of stuff. It happens when you do arts and crafts as a hobby. But sometimes the stuff gets a little out of control and things don't get put back the way they should and then everything is with everything and it just gets kind of stupid... particularly when you spend most of your non-sleeping, non-working, non-mundane activities such as housework or grocery acquisition in one room: the office / studio / living room.

It's where the computer is, it's where the desk is, it's where the tv is, and it's where most of my stuff is... and it got a little unruly during that period when I was taking that medication that made me want to sleep my days away or eat pizza or cry for hours at a time.

Apparently, I should be more ashamed of this than I am (which, quite frankly isn't very much)...

 It looked worse before I took this picture... this is halfway there.

 prismacolors, verithins, ball point pens, drawing pencils, markers, tape, and plastic storage bags...

 miscellaneous, make-up (why is that here?), hangers, doo-dads...

 I'm clearly set on mini clothespins, hole punches, tubes of glitter...

Even the worm jewelry needs a home.

But, the thing is that I'm in the middle of reorganizing all this stuff so that things do get put away or actually have a home. And on a basic level, since I have a lot of small things, my chosen method of storing them involves those little plastic pencil boxes; largely because I have a lot of pens and pencils or small things.

Anyway, I spent a goodly amount of time this week separating art supplies by kind, and going through all my containers to sort everything. Organizing does seem like a huge time suck, but sitting in my living room and not having the floor littered with piles of stuff — actually seeing large swaths of carpeting in the middle of the room is rewarding in it's own way: I actually feel like being there, instead of wishing I was somewhere else doing something else. It's a feeling I haven't had in a while.

Plus I sat there watching tv while I was doing it, so, technically, it was still multi-tasking.

I realize that my version of orderly is someone else's chaos... but eventually I'll have everything put away to my satisfaction. Of course, then it will be time to start a project and pull it all out again. It's a perpetual cycle.

But for now, all my plastic boxes are stacked neatly on the shelf.  Papers are sorted, and organized, and for the most part - in cabinets or on shelves... and more importantly, I can see the surface area of my desk again. It seems silly, even though I still have more organizing to do and stuff to neaten up, but it's so much nicer when things aren't everywhere on every flat surface.

Now that my desk has been liberated from disorder, it's probably time to get some stuff done.

Have a nice weekend! :D

I want a makeover

I think of it as my office / studio / living room... I would say it measures roughly 12 feet by 20 feet, and it contains 2 desks, 2 computers, 3 printers, 1 television, 1 television stand, 2 shelves, 2 rocking chairs, 1 couch, 2 end tables, a hutch for the expensive printer to sit on, my large paper cutter, and a lot of paper and paint and glue and otherwise miscellaneous art supplies and stacks of Rolling Stone magazines.

 This is where I spend a lot of time sitting...

Oh, and it's peachy-pink or pinky-peach. Technically, regardless of how that color looks in the pictures — it's peach. It wasn't until I forfeited 50 days of my life to the side effects of pills that I realized that I'm tired of looking at peach.  

It was a completely random and arbitrary color choice. The studio / office / living room — where I spend the vast majority of my non-sleeping, non-working, non-grocery shopping time — is in the basement, the unfinished basement.  So, technically, it has 3 walls. 2 of them are cement, and the other is made of fabric.  It was the fabric wall that determined the color scheme of the room.  See that panel of fabric in the first picture behind my computer? There are 3 of those that hang on the opposite end of the room.  The paint color on the wall is the same as the background of that fabric.

That fabric? I bought it in the clearance section of a JoAnn's like 10 years ago.  So, I've been looking at it for 10 years I guess, and now I'm tired of seeing it. Cement, btw, is hard to hang things on, hence the occasional fabric panel - like the one behind my computer.  Any artwork that hangs in the room is suspended via fishing line from nails that are fixed in the baseboard around the ceiling...

I know, I should go outdoors more (because it's been 94˚F to 103˚F for the last 2 weeks — heat stroke, awesome) and enjoy my crispy brown yard or the sweltering heat? My other option is basically the bedroom... and the bedroom is a technological negaverse where the most advanced technology is a tie between my stereo (cd AND cassette player, which is so old that I doubt that the cassette part works) or the alarm clock. I'm not really the type to lay in bed and read books... oh, and did I mention the lack of air conditioning?

Yeah, so I want an office / studio / living room makeover... something that isn't peach.

I like this color. I believe I could stare at it peripherally everyday without trying to imagine I was somewhere else. So, now apparently I have to go on a quest to find some fabric with a nice gaudy floral pattern (the more seventies looking the better) that involves the use of this color.

And in the mean time, I've been trying to work on the general 'chronic disorganization' that seems to plague the room.  Every flat surface somehow ends up cluttered up with piles of papers and drawings and art supplies and cardboard, and well, it looks a little like an episode of hoarders minus the animals, rotting food, and water damage... yeah, it just looks like a paper tornado came through here most of the time.

Anyway, in order to change the paint color — I have to move everything. So, now I have an excuse to waste endless hours of time rifling through stacks of papers and throwing things away. At least it's ten degrees cooler down here.

I like stuff

Wikipedia could probably tell you all about the history of Valentines Day... and Google probably could point you in the direction. Admittedly, I'm not really a history buff. That doesn't mean that I hate facts, I'm just indifferent to some things.

Valentine's Day is about that heart shaped box of chocolates, and seeing pink and red and white and hearts everywhere. It's trying to remember expressions of love... it's not quite as much of an "invented" holiday as "Sweetest Day," but it's about consumerism nonetheless.

I'm a participating consumer; otherwise I'm indifferent to the concept of consumerism, because it's just not something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I buy groceries, I buy stuff, hell, I even like stuff. I distinctly remember my seventh grade English teacher telling us that "stuff" is a dead word. But well, *eyeroll,* that hasn't ever stopped me from using it.

I like stuff. Yes, I said it: I like stuff. I mean, you know, if you've looked at any of my previous entries then you may have noticed that I happen to make stuff. So, it's not out of the question that I like stuff. Plus this is a blog, so I need to write about stuff or post some pictures or something... and it's Valentine's Day time, so I guess it's time to talk about love or stuff like it.

I'm not terribly obsessed with Valentine's Day. I buy a heart-shaped box of chocolates, I get a box of heart-shaped chocolates, and if I'm feeling frisky, then maybe I remember to make a couple of greeting cards. BTW, I like eating chocolate.

So, this is a post about stuff I like. Particularly some stuff that I like that happens to be in my "office."

I enjoy knick knacks, or inappropriately appropriating objects as knick knacks. Many of my knick knacks are toys or things that are apparently supposed to be left out in your garden (where presumably the birds would do their business on them and the insects would crawl all over them). I have an infinite collection of lizards, turtles, and frogs (and the occasional bird). A few of them are legitimate knick knacks, the rest were apparently intended for the garden. The more realistic the replica animal - the better. So, these are some shots of my menagerie.

I like books by Hunter S. Thompson.
I like the music of Warren Zevon, Pink Floyd, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Everclear, John Denver, Rush, Jethro Tull, Bob Dylan...
I like listening to music I like.
I like watching tv.
I like doing nothing and imagining stories (which I believe they call day dreaming).
I like the color violet, and buying violet-colored things.
I like irises.
I like Coca Cola; regular Coke & Cherry Coke.
I like Mary Janes and striped socks.
I like those ridiculous and often gaudy patterned sheets from the seventies.
I like chocolate, particularly those Lindor bars.
I like coconut.
I like pleasantly warm weather.

I like a lot of things, as I imagine we all do, so listing them might get a little frivolous, but this was my "Valentines" theme post, so, I hope you take a moment to think about the stuff you like, and maybe remember why.