Happy Birthday Rose

I just wanted to take a moment and wish my sister Rose Marie (Seifert) Silvia a happy birthday if she is still alive and out there somewhere.  Last seen in TX a number of years ago and vanished mysteriously. She was active on the search engine optimisation scene and also a breeder and speaker on purebred horses and also an owner of the former equineinfo.com. She's my older sister. I was the 2nd child in a family with five children.

If you are still alive, I wish you a happy birthday and inner peace.

Moving to the Desert

Being an artist has ground to a halt while we try to get everything moved to our new home 100+ miles from here. We are making an extreme lifestyle change from city to desert. It wasn't even my choice. My boyfriend picked the location. I hated the idea at first, but I find myself wanting to get out to our new place as soon as I possibly can and away from Anaheim.  There are two forms of motivation; the carrot and the stick.  And both are in play here. From the minute we got a new landlord I've wanted out from under his thumb.  The last insult was when he threatened to evict us when we told him we needed to pay an extra half a month's rent because the move was taking longer than expected.  Part of that was because we had to deal with a sick cat that had to be put to sleep, and the other part was we didn't find a new place to move to until literally a few days ago. It's all well and good to want to live somewhere but until somebody agrees you are worthy of staying in their house, it's all just jibber-jabber. We had to settle for a much smaller house than we wanted. But then we had a container put onto it and so that will replace our need for a garage and storage and give us more shade and work space.

We are out in the sticks and I think I'm going to love it. We will have weather.  It's supposed to snow in the winters.  Thunderstorms should be awesome. And it was windy last night. I haven't spent a night in the new place though. We still have another van full of stuff to move before we can stay there and call it home.

I'm looking forward to taking great photos out there. I'll be painting outdoors as well. 

Getting a container for the office/storage/work area.

Sunset in Lucerne Valley

Custer and a stop sign.  Our closest big intersection.

Demands

 A sign I need in my kitchen and office.

Sidewalk Fairy

Today I was looking for a blog background and found this sidewalk art I did years ago. She's pastel. I loved doing it but it's hard on the hands and knees. I need a waist high sidewalk with a hole in the middle.

Two New Zelvolutions

I do my best to draw every day and lately I've been having fun with these.

The Doldrums

I'm going through a period where I'm kinda motivated to do 1000 different things, but I'm not really getting much satisfaction from any of them. I don't know what to do with myself lately. Sure, I have plenty to do, but it all feels so empty lately. I'm just not getting the same thrill from it that I used to. I might even get excited about getting the parts to make something, but once I have it in hand, I don't feel like making it anymore. I have abandoned projects laying around everywhere. I've already raised 2 kids, been through college, lived in various cities and states.  Other things I'd like to do like going to Europe are out of my financial reach. I'd like to move but I can't do that either. I'd like a safe car to drive but I don't earn enough to even begin to save for something like that. I feel like I'm going nowhere fast. Everywhere I turn I'm up against a wall.

The Carrot and the Stick Revisited

When you set goals, it helps to have rewards and punishments. For example, say you want to give up soda for one week.  If you succeed, you treat yourself to getting your ears pierced and you get a sparkly new pair of earrings.  If you fail, you have to weed the garden every day for a week. For this to work it helps to have a friend you are accountable to. A goal buddy, if you will.  Otherwise you might just rationalize the stick away. My daughter used this system with weight loss and the reward was a diamond ring. She must have really wanted it because it worked great for her.

The caveat is that you can't have your reward for one thing screw up your goal in another area. If you goal was to stay out of debt, you probably can't reward yourself for losing weight with buying a diamond ring.  So that gets a bit tricky. You don't want to reward your child for cleaning their bedroom with a box of chocolate chip cookies.

This technique of rewards and punishments is also used in hypnosis. For example the hypnotherapist might say, "If you get through 24 hours without a cigarette, you get to reward yourself with a wonderful feeling of well being.  If you fail, your feet will itch terribly every time you light up."

I need to come up with some good carrots and sticks for the goals that have eluded me, like weight loss.

No Blog Left Behind

Every blog I've started represents a part of me and a special time in my life. Some of them fall by the wayside as my interests change.  But I rarely lose interest in my passions completely.  For example I don't juggle much anymore, but every now and then I get re-inspired and juggle up a storm.  So I'm happy that I keep my juggling blog.

Sometimes one thing would fit in many blogs and I don't have time to add them to all the blogs.  Like if I knit a hat, it could go in my knitting blog, my fiber arts blog, my hatitude blog, or my craft blog.  Usually I put it in the blog with the most readers because it's most likely to get seen there, but then the more specialized blogs don't get updated.

Today I just updated my rubber stamping blog for the first time in a year.  I haven't been stamping much, but suddenly I'm interested all over again and hope to post all my new stamps there.  I just bought 4 packages of erasers that all need to be carved.

So every now and then I sort through all my blogs and try to give each one a post or two.  I want to keep them alive even if some of them are barely breathing.
Some of them, like my Second Life blog is dead because I can't get onto Second Life with this computer. So I have nothing new to add.

The same with my Steampunk blog. I mean well but haven't had the time or the space to make my Steampunk projects yet, so I have nothing new to add. My new 'job' making videos is sucking a great deal of my time.  I'm just making hay while the sun shines because who knows how long those people will have a budget to pay me to make videos.

To a degree blogging is driven by comments.  If no one comments on existing posts I don't have much incentive to make new posts.  In short, if everyone comments on my knitting blog, I'll post a lot more to it.  If no one is interested, I don't really feel like talking to myself. I have a real life longhand journal to write in if I'm just writing to myself.

I've seen blogs which literally have three posts about their topic, and fifty comments. And the blog hasn't been updated in two years. I'm always amazed when people draw so many comments. I'm lucky to get one or two per post ever.

I know Google will crawl blogs and they seem to like two things; fresh content, and longevity.  It works in your favor to keep updating your old blogs.  The spiders look at that and say, "Oooh, that person has been blogging for five years and they also have new posts". That's my goal..to always have a reason to give people to drop by my blogs.