Lovely Lettuce

Lookee what I have. It's March 30, and usually I don't even plant my lettuce until April. At this rate, we'll be eating salad by May 1. Yum.

I've already hardened these off and they will go in the planter some day this week. If we get frost warnings, all I'll need to do is cover them lightly with either plastic or fabric. Lettuce doesn't mind a slight touch of frost.

In a couple of weeks, I'll plant new seeds in my second lettuce planter (directly outside this time), so I'll have a nice little crop rotation going.

Ooh, and my green onion sets arrived today too. Now I just need to find time to get out in the yard.

March nude

Here is this month's effort. Richard helped with a lot of details on this one. Still, we both agree that I'm making progress.

a brief check-in post

I haven't died, and I'm not sick. I've just been busy, and I don't have much that I want to say lately.

A lot has been going on with Michael's film project. For example, the casting agent Michael hired already has his script in the hands of two well-known actors. We hope to hear something this week. If they turn us down, we have others on the list.

I have been missing my fiction writing, so I've gone back to working on the final revision of my novel. That's taking up my personal writing time, so I'm not blogging.

And as much as I love my nude figure class, I have desperately missed my color work. So I finally finished a colored-pencil piece I started last August (!). I'm very pleased with it.

I don't know how much I'm going to be blogging. I'm just sort of waiting to see what the inner spirit tells me.

Hope you are all well.

changes, going through changes

I haven't blogged for the last week because I'm going through a phase I call "getting my life back." I do this every once in a while. In this case, the combination of my mom's death and a nearly two-month illness threw everything for a loop. For one thing, I lost a lot of my personal discipline. I started a lot of comfort eating after Mom's death, and I'm now trying to break those habits. And when I was coughing so much, I couldn't exercise, so I'm trying to get that discipline back too.

Second, the combination of two freelance jobs and a weekly art class hasn't left me with much time or energy for my personal practice of art and writing. I miss it. I desperately miss drawing in color (Richard still has me using charcoal), and I am starting to deeply miss writing fiction. So I am trying to carve space in my life to do those things again.

Last, I am going through some deep internal reevaluation, and it may end up leading me to unknown parts. For my whole life, I've battled a nearly constant presence of simmering, low-level discontent. Mostly it has to do with not being free to spend as much time on my personal creativity as I'd like. I've recently had some new insights that the discontent may have more to do with the way I define my life than with my actual circumstances. Perhaps I have more power over the situation than I've let myself realize because I'm still viewing my life through the interpretive lens I developed when I was about ten years old (or even younger). At any rate, I'm trying to sort that out. For whatever reason, this blog has not felt like the place to discuss that exploration in detail . . . at least not yet.

A week ago, as I sat in my allergist's office waiting for him to see me, I was glancing through a woman's magazine and came across an excerpt from a book called The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

Basically, it is the record of one woman's year-long project to make herself happier by achieving concrete measurable goals. She chose habits to acquire by concentrating on things that make her feel more positive, not things that were "right." For example, she feels more upbeat when her bathroom is clean, so she spent a month acquiring the habit to clean her bathroom. Her theory is that if she is happier, she's nicer to the people around her and more energetic and more productive and more creative . . . well, you get the idea.

I don't think I've ever mentioned this here, but I am a total sucker for self-improvement lists and charts where you check off that you've worked on acquiring a habit each day. They often turn into legalistic traps for me, so I have to be careful. What I like about this project is that it isn't about external standards. It's about habits that improve the way I feel about myself. In other words, the actions are pretty much the same, but the motive is different, less judgmental.

So I've started using this concept to reacquire the various disciplines I described earlier. I'm also trying to use it to make time for my personal creativity--not every day, but at least once a week. Then, after a few weeks of success at that, I'll try to do it more.

So that's what's going on in my little world.

P.S. Fiwa thought my link above was to the article, not the book. So for those who are interested, here is a link to the online article.

Thankful Thursday

I've had several things to be grateful for lately.

Two weeks ago, our dishwasher sprung a leak. A piece of silverware fell in the bottom, landed on the heat coil, and conducted heat down to the tub, thus melting a hole in it. Actually, it happened several days before we noticed it, so we had water dripping into the basement and oozing under the carpet. The wet spot was what finally tipped us off. So we had Sears Home Repair come out, and lo and behold, when we bought the appliance, we also purchased an extended service warranty, which I'd completely forgotten. The salesman, bless him, said that dishwashers were one of the appliances he recommended paying the extra money to extend the warranty. The result is that the dishwasher is working again, and we did not have to pay for the $600 in new parts or the labor. Thank God for that.

Michael and I have been worried because I still haven't completely shaken off the cough from the cold I caught December 26. Tuesday I finally went to see my allergist because I was afraid that the problem was a deterioration of my asthma. The good news is that no, my lung function is about the same as it was six years ago. It's just a particularly persistent virus this year. So knock another major worry off my list.

My light garden came but was missing some parts. Well, they arrived this week and I've got it up and working. I can start my seeds now. Hooray.

A couple of weeks ago my art teacher gave me a shoebox full of drawing charcoal because he said he'd never use it all. His thoughtfulness really encouraged me.

Finally, Michael and I like to keep lists of DVDs we want to get eventually. Within the last month, we put a couple of older movies on the list (Funny Girl and Emma). Last night, we went out because I had a bad case of cabin fever and our last stop was Borders, just to look around. And they had both those DVDs on a discount table—which had only about 40 different movies, so what are the odds?!!!

So those are my little (and big) gratitudes for today.

Books, I've Been Reading Books

I've been reading a lot lately: mysteries for fun, a few serious novels, and lots of history for work. I haven't been able to keep up with writing reviews, but I did add a dozen or so books to my library thing list over in the sidebar. I'm sure that there are some I've forgotten to list . . . in fact, I know there are because I read about ten books on Islam in November and I can't remember most of the names.

Anyway, there is one book I want to recommend to anyone who likes reading about history:

Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (P.S.)

It is an account of the Magellan expedition that circumnavigated the globe, and it was one of the most dramatic, incredible voyages in the history of the world. Five ships with some 260 men set out from Spain. Three years later, one battered ship with 18 gaunt and half-dead survivors returned. Along the way, the fleet experienced storms, shipwreck, multiple mutinies, starvation, scurvy, war with natives of the Philippines, exotic sexual dalliances, and danger from Spain's rival Portugal.

The book is gripping and reads like a novel. If you're interested in stories of people pushed to the limits of their endurance, you'll love this.