Doin' It Wrong

I spent a lot of time on Wednesday working out in my backyard, and while doing so, I came to the realization that I've been doing my summer all wrong.
    As I've said before, the day after the spring art show is like New Year's Day for me because I'm finally released to work on the projects I want to work on instead of projects I have to work on. During the first part of the year, I'm chained to the drafting table, but my mind is wandering, dreaming of the day when I can finally work on that painting, that piece of furniture, that little woodworking project, etc., etc.
    What I did was to start on one project that I can't finish just yet, and another that is going to take months to get it just right.  And both of these are projects that do not require either sunlight or warm dry weather.
    Right after the show, I decided that it would be a good idea to replenish my inventory now instead of waiting till the fall.  I figured out which prints I needed matted and framed, and started cutting mats.  But I hadn't gotten into it very far when I realized that some of the information on my certificates was out of date, specifically an old phone number and a non-functioning website.  Unfortunately, the woodburning computer that I have the Print Shop program on is barely functioning, and it has no printer anyway, which means I have to use my Dad's computer.  He has a much later version of Print Shop, but I have trouble using it.  The night I went over to his house to try to get the certificates done, the results were not good.  He tells me he's fixed the problem, but I haven't been back over there to see what he's done.
    The other project is my Titanic model.  After I finished my Lusitania model last December, I couldn't wait to get started on the Titanic.  When I did, I discovered some flaws in the way the model was manufactured.  I want this model to be perfect, so I'm spending a lot of time working on the details, but mostly I'm spending a lot of time thinking and waiting for paint to dry.  I could be doing this as I'm finishing my day instead of letting it take over my whole day.
    What I realized while mowing the lawn the other day was that the first thing I need to do is clean out my garage.  That would free up a lot of workspace, and help me to stop procrastinating on some of the other projects I want to get done this summer -- projects that individually won't take so much time.  Then there's the problem of time management, which means more sleep and less computer.  That's going to be hard, but one thing I know about myself is that if I get started on something early, I'll work on it all day.
    So now I know what to do.  I just need to remember what it is when my weekend rolls around in a few days.

Happy New Year!!

    The Downtown Edmond Art Show 2014 is over, and I did pretty well.  It helped that the piece that I worked on for the previous four months sold the day before the show started.  But I had some difficulties in time availability and management that prevented me from getting more than the one piece done, and I was also not fully stocked on prints.  When the show was over, there were two pieces that I only had one print left, and one of those was framed.
    During the four month period of time that I'm working on getting ready for the show (which I refer to as my "hibernation" since there is practically no social life,) I always get a lot of ideas for projects to work on during the summer, and usually I am just busting to get started on them, but this year I put them off for a bit.  The first weekend I spent just cleaning the studio.  It took most of two days, and I still feel like there's more to be done.  This weekend is being spent matting and framing, getting ready for next year.  I figure if I do it now, I won't be in a rush next Spring.  Next weekend I have some work to be done for clients.
    This was the 21st year to do the Edmond show, and the weather and turnout couldn't have been better.  My Dad came by to deliver some business cards and he had to park three blocks away.  But I was alone for much of the show.  Gaby is working a new job (yay!), and he wasn't available most of the daytime hours.  It was the first time I'd set up by myself in a decade, though the two of us raised the tent the night before.  Still, everything went very smoothly -- at least, at the show.
    Part of the time availability problem I had during the hibernation was that for a month my weekends were split.  This is not only exhausting for a night shift person, but it robs one of all useful time.  One is given the choice of either sleeping or doing, and one Friday night I came to work on only 40 minutes of sleep.  That's not good when your job is to drive other people's cars.  But fortunately our new bell captain is very sympathetic, and he corrected the problem promptly.  His assistant, on the other hand, created a problem that he wants to blame on me.
    Sunday night, after the last day of the show, I was in the shower preparing to go to bed when my phone rang.  I returned the call to the unfamiliar number, and the Sunday afternoon bellman told me that I was on the schedule for that night.  I told him that that's impossible because I've been at art show all weekend, and I'm not available.  He said, Oh yeah, that's right, and that he'd call the boss and see what was to be done.  The overnight security guy was splitting time between that department and ours, so he wound up covering for me.  (He never said so, but I got the impression that he wasn't happy, and blamed me for the situation.)
    On Monday night, I told this story to several people who all seemed to understand the situation from my point of view, but on Tuesday night I was informed that I had been written up for a no call/no show.  Ridiculous, I thought, and said so in written form on the write-up sheet that I didn't sign.  The next morning, the ABC took me to a private room and explained that MY assessment of the situation was wrong.  He said that I had requested time off, part of that request had been denied, that if I'd checked the schedule I would have seen that I was working.  I thought his argument was very reasonable and well presented, but he was still flat wrong.  I did not request time off.  I informed him of dates that I WOULD NOT BE AVAILABLE.  His failure to use that information when he made the schedule is not my fault.  And although it is true that I should have looked at the schedule, I still would not have been in to work that night because I WAS NOT AVAILABLE. 
    Anyway, this is still ongoing, though in the background.
    Since Gaby started working, he cannot go out to the club with me on Monday night, which is my only night that I can go out.  I've stolen time to go out a couple of times this Spring, but without him, there seems to be a hole in the evening.  Now that the hibernation is over, I can go out on a somewhat regular basis, but in the last four months I've missed out on a lot of what's going on in the lives of our friends, so I really don't know if Monday is going to be much of a habit with them anymore.  I miss seeing everybody.  But I still work with the lynchpin of the gang, and there's always Facebook to keep me somewhat informed.
    Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting started on all these Summer projects I've got bouncing around in my head.  A friend once said that the day after the art show was like New Years Day for me.  I totally agree.  And I resolve to... try not to waste the whole Summer.

Happy New Year

The one and only art show that I've done this spring is over, and that frees up a lot of time to work on the backlog of projects piling up around here. As one of my co-workers put it, "Wow, the day after the show is like New Year's for you." An apt description.

So I got the studio cleaned up, mostly, and the show stuff put away, and most of the bookkeeping done, and I sat down at the drafting table. Gaby came in and asked what I was doing, and I said, "Just trying to figure out what to do next." He asked me what kinds of things I needed to be doing, and I started on the list. When I mentioned staining the tables for the living room, he said, "Ooh! Do that one!"

The tables in question are a trio of tables (an occasional table, a coffee table, and one of those tall skinny tables that goes in the entry or behind the couch) that I picked up at a garage sale last summer for $50. They have beautiful styling, but when I found them they were painted with a two tone finish, the paint on the tops of the tables was scratched, and they smelled like cat piss.

Last October, when my friend Ted was staying with us, he worked on stripping the tables and managed to get two of them done. After it got too cold to work outside, the project was put away. Ted got a job, his own place, and then moved to Oregon to escape his ankle-biting girlfriend, leaving us with doubts that he would finish this project.

Yesterday, I went to the Wally-world and got a can of dark walnut stain. My new framing table in the studio provided a lot of space to work, and I managed to get the occasional table coated twice, and the top of the coffee table coated once. The underside of the coffee table has one coat as of this morning, as well as a second coat on the top. They look good.

Staining furniture is a messy job.

I'm not sure when my next day off will be, but that's the day I'll be applying the polyeurethane, weather permitting. I'll give that a week to dry, and then we'll move them into the living room.

All The (Unused and Unusable) Time In the World

In the winter, typically, I am an idea hamster. I get a bunch of ideas about things I'm going to do as soon as the weather gets warmer. Relatively few of those ideas actually come to fruition, but they don't all go away just because they hadn't been accomplished. They just sit in the back of my head and develop into little bubbles of guilt and regret.

True, time and money do play a big factor, but a lot of times it's just poor planning or no planning or just plain old ordinary wasting my time (especially in front of the computer or TV). Then there is the backward thinking, which is really irritating (I can't do this till I do that, but i can't do that till I do the other, etc, etc, ad infinitim.) I also use my schedule as both a reason and an excuse; likewise the people in my life.

I was sitting in our "yellow room" (a spare bedroom that has been turned into a sort of lounge/reading room/ studio annex) just looking around and thinking. Gaby came in and asked what I was doing and I started telling him about all the things that I'm not getting done, and some of the reasons for that:

I have a model of the Lusitania that I got some 25 years ago, and little of it has been put together. (I also have a Titanic model in the same large scale that hasn't been touched yet.) The reason is because I don't have a space I can dedicate to that project. Plus, I am mixing my own paint colors to match the paintings by Ken Marshall in Robert Ballard's book. In short, I am making this into a very complicated project that I don't have time or space for. But it will be magnificent when it's done.

I have a number of things that I'm trying to sell on ebay. I just need to post the auctions. I don't particularly have an excuse for not doing this, except that I want the auctions to end at a particular time, therefore I have to post them at a particular time, and something always seems to come up. Or I just forget.

I'm supposed to be working on a research project for my brother. I have the materials to do it (three books, a pencil, and a yellow pad), but it requires a lot of reading and cross referencing and typing the results. I really don't have an excuse to not be working on this project except that it falls victim to "getting started is the hardest part," as many of my projects do, because the stuff gets put away or moved, and getting them out again and figuring out where I was before the stuff got moved is just too much trouble. I also need time to myself to think, and that's hard to come by.

Then there's my Spanish lesson, which I am also blogging about. Again, getting started is the hardest part. Plus, I'm overcomplicating it, while not getting enough practice. Time to myself is not a problem with this project, because having Gaby here is (usually) helpful. I guess I have no excuse.

I'm working on two pen & inks and six paintings. I got a lot done on one of the drawings last weekend (yay), but this weekend all eight projects either are or need something that is behind the wall of snow between the house and the studio. At this point, I'm not sure that I'm going to get anything done on these this weekend. (Truth be told, though, three of the paintings haven't been touched in years.)

I wasn't expecting the weather to get in the way of my current art projects. When I think of weather interference I'm usually just thinking that it's too cold to work in the garage, or too wet to work out on the patio. But right now it's 9½° outside and we have 10 inches of snow blown up into huge drifts that prevent us from doing a lot of stuff. We're stuck in the house because the snow is too deep to drive through, and we are using electric portable heaters because the central heat quit working this morning. We have a kerosene heater that is very efficient, but makes the house smell bad for weeks. Gaby is afraid to use it. I'm afraid not to, because if we don't use one of the electric heaters in the utility room the pipes around the washing machine may burst. We really need a new storm door and a new energy efficient window on that room. Things we need to do when we have money and nice weather.

Other things that require nice weather:

We have some tables for the living room, two of which need to be stripped, all four need to be stained.

The framing business has pretty much fizzled out, and I have hundreds of frame samples that I want to make into little wall shelves and other things to sell on ebay... which reminds me, I need a scroll saw. But I also need a warm garage.

But the big project is changing the arrangement of my studio to accomodate a new direction in the business. This will require moving a lot of stuff, most of it paper goods, out on the patio while construction is going on, so the weather has to be dry. It also needs to be warm, since the doors will be open through most of the project. Everytime I go out in the studio I am so distracted by the excitement of this project that I have trouble making myself do something useful. I've measured the room over and over again. I know the results will be the same every time, but I just can't help it. I repeatedly go over the details in my head, afraid that I will forget something when the time comes.

Anyway, that's how I am: obsessing over the things I can't do now, neglecting the things I should do now. I've been this way all my life. I do actually accomplish a few things, but it's never enough, and always at the last minute. And every year it's going to be different. But this year I have a plan.

Things I'll Never get Around To, Chapter 1

The subject of a T-shirt I want to make came up in a discussion a while back. For years I've had the idea to make a T-shirt reading "Amberfimbie and Crotch, " just to see if anyone notices. Gaby suggested that we should make two Ts, one with Amberfimbie, the other with Crotch.

I get dibs on the Amberfimbie.

Summer Plans Part 2

The first week of September was my vacation (half of it anyway,) and we worked hard on the back room. New floor, new paint, and reconstucting a closet into more useful space. Putting in the floor was a lot of fun. It took about 10 hours, and looked fantastic when we were done. Naturally, Shadie was scared to death of it. (See previous post "Encore".)

The large closet at the end of the room became office space (with a built in computer desk, etc.), and a small broom closet, with storage space above.

Gaby picked the colors and did most of the painting. We put in a chair rail, painted white, and the wall above is now golden yellow, the wall below avacado green, with a maple leaf stencil above and below.

We ran out of time before we could finish. There are still the cabinet doors to do and a drawer to build, plus a few minor details. But we are very happy with the results.

Head Start

Gaby tore out the closet in the back room (aka the TV room, the red room), opening up the space for the future computer desk/broom closet. Somehow he managed to do it without waking me up. He removed the double sliding door, the wall around it, and moved in a desk, ran phone lines across the room, and set up the computer--all without making a sound. I love this guy.
Next step is to frame the broom closet and upper cabinets, put in the floor, sheetrock, paint, and install the built in desk and shelves. Let's see how quiet he can be with a hammer.

Mental Notes/Summer Plans

The art show is on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of May. I must sell $556 worth to meet expenses, but $956 would be better, to replace money taken from my savings account. After that I have 10 weeks before I am eligible to take a two week paid vacation. The only project I have planned during that 10 weeks is to lose some weight. The plan for the vacation is to work on the house. I expect that Gaby will want to start on some of the house projects early.

1. Take out the carpet in the living room and back room.
2. Sand, stain and varnish the floor in the living room.
3. Paint the living room.
4. Put in laminate flooring in the back room.
5. Finish building drawers for the back room cabinet.
6. Build shelving for back room wall.
7. Finish the details in the bathroom.
8. Build a new bed.
9. Change the closet in back room to a computer desk/study area.

Ambitious, I know. But I think the two of us can get it done.