Disaster Desk

My office is meant to be this super organized den of productivity, but I am an artist (and a scientist). This means the organization tries to cling to the cliffs of Staying Straight with tenuous fingertips only to plummet to it’s doom regularly. When its carcass becomes more than I can stand, I take time to get things together and the process starts all over again. It’s a mad cycle of insanity.

Despite that, my office has been slowly coming together in the way artistic offices should. I have already showed off my Super Mario Bros functional wall decoration. Now, let me regale you with the awesome that is my art desk.

desk

Yes, look at it if you can find it underneath the clutter – a clutter that’s out of my control. It breeds faster than tribbles in an all you can eat buffet.

Although to my credit, this clutter that you see isn’t your normal “death to organization” clutter. It’s actually part of the organization revival I mentioned previously. I have a challenge in this tiny place, you see. Well, more than one challenge.

1. We’re still unpacking. We don’t have much time to do that in. The garage is a wreck, there are things everywhere, and a couple of days a month we find time to fight with it.

2. I’m still trying to find items that “weren’t left behind”.

Today was a two steps back while going forward type of productive day. There used to be this mound of boxes in my office I needed to go through but couldn’t find the time,and they were in my way. They’ve been relegated to the garage and I can walk into the closet again. Meanwhile, a few things were rescued from those boxes. Some of those things you see on the desk there.

The husband keeps saying I should knock out that wall you see there and expand my office into the room beyond. He’s fucking crazy. The more ethical solution to my house would be to get rid of some of my things and get better organized… because knocking out a wall is only going to encourage the tribbles to spread their madness across the house. On top of ruining my house. My husband’s idea of cleaning up a mess is to move it out of sight.

Organization for an office takes a bit more than a few cubbies and well placed coat hangars, I’m afraid. Especially for me. I like to combine beauty with function.  I don’t like those horrible metal shelving systems that cut me (as opposed to giving me regular bruises) when I bump into them on top of collecting dust… and besides they’re ugly. The current trend of cubbie shelves are nice and I even have a system living in the closet, but it has also proven to be very fragile, unable to stand up to regular use by regular people. Interestingly that little white box there, whose name is Q-Bert, was a store display model. Despite being a little broken from mover abuse, he’s holding up very very well. So it’s all in what you do and how you do it with.

So yeah, the desk is covered in stuff. It was a much higher mound a couple of hours ago. I’m working on it. Unfortunately when I’m working on it, I’m not working on The Heavenly Bride. But soon, soon my minions.

The lace in the bottom half of the window panes is not a curtain, by the way. It’s lace that’s been starched up. It’s called window starching or lace window starch treatment, or some such like that. See, our windows aren’t conducive to having half curtain sets the way you see in adorable kitchen windows. Full curtains kept out the sunshine, and I’m all about not dying of Vitamin D deficiency or not being a vampire or whatever you want to call my love of getting a little sun. I had some full curtains on there but this creepy thing kept happening. People kept driving to the front of the house and staring at me through the window from the street. It was fucking creepy.

The starch treatment allows sunshine to come inside while creating a frosted look for privacy. It’s rather nice.

And ya know, those people that were staring were probably from the bank. There’s this job where if you’re late on your mortgage (like we are) they send people to photograph your house once a month. I know. I used to do it.

I’d like to find something better to put Q-Bert on than that little table. I’m considering one of those cabinets that go over the back of toilets, if I can afford one.

And those blue lanterns used to be solar powered. It was short lived. I’m going to tinker with them some day and see what I can do to improve them. I also plan to replace them with a handing bio-luminescent water lamp. Cuz it would be nice, and I’m currently crazy for window gardens.

And that’s the mundanity for today. Ta da!

So, I’m going to go back to studying Moon Conspiracies and UFOs while I get some work done. I’m sure you understand!

 

Mmmm foxes

The first snow of the year happened last night. It’s pretty out there in a deadly, white sort of way…. No I haven’t taken any pictures. Most folks have seen snow before, at least in America. I will tell you that I took my husky hybrid dogs out to play in their first snow ever, expecting they’d be excited like other huskies I’ve had in the past, and they were like… whatever. I was disappointed, I tell you. Disappointed.

Anyway, I’m here to show you a brief tutorial I put up on Youtube. It’s nothing special. Just if you’re curious about what I do, even when I take a moment off, here’s a clue.

Basically I’m demonstrating some of the things I might do to prepare an image to be converted into a cross stitch or bead looming pattern. This may be my last for a long while. The programs I have were all demos and, well, my time with them is up. I’ve no idea where I put that other one I used to have… sigh… anyway. Here you go.