It is a beautiful afternoon. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, the spring flowers are in full bloom and life is good. Nonie and I had a nice Easter breakfast at Chantrelle and then returned here to work on our several and various weekend projects. She is madly sorting photos, moving old photo files from floppy disks to CDs, making labels and squinting at the keyboard of her laptop. I have been working on making the scheduling sheets for each area for each day for the EAF on Excel (which Nonie kindly showed me how to do) and squinting at my laptop. It takes a lot of time but you can achieve exactly the form you need/want, so I guess it's a good investment of time. Besides, I can keep all these forms and then just pull them up for next year, saving myself redoing this tedious process and making what changes to next year's schedule as is deemed appropriate. I am not really thrilled with all this organizational effort on such a beautiful day, so in between making the forms for "Info Booth" and "Festival Store" I made a rubber stamp to use in my journal.
Years ago on NPR I heard a very reasonable and well-spoken man say something about how tired he was of "feckless whining". The phrase has stuck with me all these years as being the perfect anti-whining remark. Since, like most people, I do tend to wander into the realm of self-pity and downright whining in my journal on occasion, I decided that I needed a rubber stamp that I could use to print over these boring and, mostly, self-serving rants. Today I carved the stamp. I think it needed to be a stamp that looked bold and reactionary, and I am happy with the result. I can now go back through my journal and clearly mark those passages where I have written boring, whiney things that do not need to ever be revisited. (Sometimes the act of writing them down is the perfect way to expunge them from your system forever.) I am rather looking forward to going back through the pages, gleeflully stamping atop my more whiney entries --self editing. As Eunice has always said, "God hates whiners." Me, too.
I spoke with Anna Rhodes today and she kindly gave permission for me to link this blog with her website, An Artists' Retreat. I am already counting the days until my return to The Hawthorne in July. Anna is a wonderful teacher and think I should make her contact info available to anyone who would like to see what she offers. The classes at her house (for one weekend a month for the last three months) have been awesome. I love the new painting I did and the last session was on art books--very timely in terms of my current interests and readings! I have my cover started for a special, one-of-a-kind photo album for my pottery trip to Japan photos. I must be done with it before I see Anna on the 29th! I have all the paper purchased for the pages, endpapers and rice paper photo protection sheets, so it's only the cover canvas that's holding up getting this to the bindery. I’m using the design of the paper parasol I photographed outside the studio/showroom of Hozan in Shigaraki. I am smitten by that photo; the colors and the lines of the ribs always please me.
No comments:
Post a Comment