More 2010 Review

For the blog review of 2010, Gwen Bell asks, "Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it? (Author: Gretchen Rubin)."

The last thing of 2010 that I made was definitely a scrapbook page. During the Christmas break, I spent a lot of time in my crafting area making cards and pages. I loved it and found it completely reeneergizing. While working on my master's, I have very little time for play, so the break from both work and school was much needed. I have six more weeks of this program before I take an extended break so that I can focus on my Teacher of the Year resonsibilities.

Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why? (Author: Alice Bradley)


This question gives me stomach knots. I haven't completed the letting go, but I decided in December to change dentists. This upsets me. I kind of bonded with him over this last year. I like him and have finally started getting the work I needed because he helped me work through some of that. But then I discovered that he is on his third round of probation with the state examination board. Time to move on, unfortunately. The problem is that I have serious loyalty issues and feel that moving on is disloyal even if I think it is better for my pocket book and my health. I have struggled with coming to terms with this.

Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011? (Author: Cali Harris)

I discovered the 365 picture-a-day community, and even though I didn't finish the project, I did enjoy chatting up fellow 365ers and getting and giving feedback.

Still Kicking

Yup, I'm still kicking, just not blogging, so I thought I would check in and say howdie to the no one who happens to read this. I have been working on my master's through an on-line program, which means I spend way too much time at my computer - reading, posting, researching and writing papers. The fallback is that I don't want to spend any more time uploading photos or blogging. But I really ought to because both of those activities give me my creative fix.

I scrapbooked yesterday with the girlfriends at County Purr Farm. Totally energizing. I need my creative outlet and just plain don't have enough time for it lately. I am much happier when I get to be creative on a regular basis. Meditation too keeps me happy, and it too has taken a back seat to all of life's demands.

School rocks. I love my classes. They don't make me laugh as much as some years, but they are subdued and hardworking, which makes my time in the classroom easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, as my daughter would say.

I would love to post about what I'm reading, but alas unless you're interested in the recent research on inclusion and co-teaching programs or the school improvement process, well, then you're just not gonna care. Since I don't get time to read for fun, I am dieing for the opportunity to cuddle with my Kindle. Just the sight of her depresses me.

What else is up? Oh, I think I bought my dentist a new car. Yup, I traded a few pieces of white ceramic the size of a pea for $12 of work. Thank goodness for insurance, HSAs, and interest-free loans. I'm not sure what hurt more - having the anaesthetic wear off after the implant before I could take a Vicodin or seeing the $5500 bill for the five hours I spent on the not-so-comfy chair in one day. That's pretty much the focus of my world these days.

Happy Nevada Day to all you Nevadans. I am off to read a couple chapters on data analysis and fall lifeless into bed.

Recycled Art

I have been playing with some recycled materials for a craft project. Not being able to buy anything makes me look around for more available materials. In particular, I am covering a binder and using an old wool jacket for part of the design.

This process got me thinking about recycled art, so I spent some time browsing web pages of recycled art galleries.

Here's one I found that had a wide variety of artists. They have both crafts and what I could consider art. This piece made me giggle.

I thought this glass kitchen ware was pretty cool.

And I had fun shopping Etsy stores trying to find a present for a friend who is very eco-friendly herself and who also happens to write. I finally found this, but if your birthday is in early February and your name is Terri and you are a vegetarian, don't follow that link.

So that's enough of my link-heavy post. Wish I knew if I could use other people's images in my own blog legally and ethically.

Happy day, everyone.

Best Stationery of 2009

I think for this prompt from Gwen Bell, I am choosing something I made. I love to make my own cards and send them to people. I think my favorite was this owl card, which I made from found objects - a leaf, a twig and some cardboard.

I also enjoyed making this card for my cousin's wedding.

Sending notes in cards I made makes it feel more personal. The owl card, for example, was for my friend Kathy's birthday. She is very environmentally aware, so I thought it was appropriate. The wedding card was for a person who is very feminine, and the colors were similar to the colors of her wedding invitation.

P.S. Thank you to Gwen Bell for spelling stationery correctly. Stationery/Stationary are vocab words on my students' usage list. Many don't even know what stationery is. They've never heard of nice paper you write letters on. They're certainly the digital generation.

Best Gift of 2009

Gwen Bell asks the following question for today's prompt: What's a gift you gave yourself this year that has kept on giving?

I could be repetitive here and say it was the happiness and peace of mind that my focus on practice brought about, but I don't like repetition nor do I see the point of repetition in blogland.

This question can be taken figuratively or literally, of course. Maybe the best gift was letting go or maybe it was a new coffee pot.

I am going to take this prompt more literally and talk about two things I spent money on that were for me. The first, which rings in at less than five dollars, is this coffee cup. It sounds silly, I know, but there's something about drinking coffee out of a mug that is both pretty and that also happens to fit nicely into your freakishly small hands. It's a gift that I appreciate every morning when I take that first sip of steaming hot coffee.

The second was a retreat, but not a meditation retreat. On my weekend birthday, three of my four best girlfriends and I attended a scrapbooking retreat at Saint Mary's retreat center in Virginia City. This was a special gift for me for a number of reasons: I got to spend quiet time with my close friends, I met some cool people, I got a lot of scrapbooking done, and I discovered the very cool place that is Saint Mary's. I scampered back to Dharma Zephyr to tell them about this place, since we just recently lost our gorgeous retreat center. They were already onto the site, which means we're going to have at least a couple retreats there in 2010. It's such a cool, old place, complete with ghost stories and creaking hallways, and it's surrounded by rolling fields of brush, which makes it incredibly quiet and relaxing.

My goal for 2010 is to do a residential retreat, but if none work out for me, I just may rent a room at Saint Mary's for a weekend and do my own, personal meditation retreat.

Best of 2009: Startup, Moment of Peace, and Challenge

Gwen Bell - Big Love in a Small World - Blog - The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge: "What's a business that you found this year that you love? Who thought it up? What makes it special?"

Can't say I can think of anything. Not one. I have stores I love. My favorite being County Purr Farm, my local scrapbooking store, where I have spent hours with my closest girl friends creating and talking. I also love The Purple Avacado, although I can count on one hand how many times I crossed the purple threshold in 2009. I will always enjoy spending time at my local JoAnne's and the local Mill End even if the past two years have seen a drastic decrease in my time at the sewing machine. There's something about walking down aisles of fabric, creating in my head all sorts of projects - a skirt from purple jersey for me, blue and white PJs for my son, a lady bug dress for my daughter. I get to sew even if the products never materialize. As weird as it may seem, I love my neighborhood Walgreen's - I print my beloved photos there, and you can get great college-ruled, purse-sized notebooks for a dollar! I still love New York and Company for clothes that actually fit me and Gap Body for the most comfie undies known to womankind.

None of these count, however, because they are not new to me. So I'm tapping out of this one.

For my catch-up entry, Ms. Bell asks about a moment of peace. This year is a good one for me. I would say I reached a deeper state of concentration than I have before and that I have reached levels of peace more profoundly than I have before, but it seems that writing about them is impossible without making it sound trite and cliche. Let me just say that my three-month focus on practice, my retreats, and Focused and Fearless really helped me progress in my practice.

My best challenge is easy, but what I just wrote had to be deleted because it would not be professional of me to post about it in a public setting. I'll sum it up to say budget cuts suck, and sometimes being the person representing others can be incredibly stressful - knowing that if you blow it, you're blowing it for thirty people, not just yourself, adds to the stress immensely. It was a challenge in managing anger, in leading, in communicating, and in dealing with disagreement. We lost. But I grew a lot in the process.

Best Blog Find of 2009

I am catching up on the Best of 2009 blog prompts.

In some sort of voyeuristic way, I like to read blogs, but the truth is that it's too easy to spend countless hours reading about someone else's life rather than living my own. So in general, I avoid them.

Then I found this blog: Creative Therapy. It's a blog where they post a weekly challenge to create art about a personal topic. It's largely for scrapbookers, but there are all kinds of mixed media artists who participate.

The blog serves more than one purpose for me. To begin with, it feeds into that voyeuristic side of me, that part of me that likes to see what people are watching on TV when I drive past their homes, the part of me that likes to browse through random people's Flikr postings and imagine what each person must be like and what her life must be like, that part of me that likes to listen to conversations around me - in restaurants, in lines, in stores while they're on cell phones. On Creative Therapy, I can read about one woman's anger toward her mother-in-law and another's desire to learn to fly. I totally dig that kind of thing.

I also get to see great and different kinds of mixed media art, which intrigues me. I'm a scrapbooker, but I can appreciate the work I see on this web page. They highlight a different artist every week, too, which means I get to find new sources of inspiration for my crafts, which is always fun.

I also like the idea that scrapbooking doesn't always have to be about events (birthdays, holidays and recitals) and that they don't always have to be about the happy elements of life (how great my kids are, how cute they are, how I love my dogs). I scrapbook about my kids for my kids (and for me), but I have recently started a Book of Me so that my kids can one day know me as a person, not just as their mom. These challenges give me ideas to include in that album. And it won't always be pretty and happy.

But I also like the prompts they give, which get me thinking about myself in ways I sometimes haven't thought about myself. Like what is something I want to do before my next birthday, for example. I haven't actually created a page off these prompts, yet, but I plan to for my book of me album.