Better and Better

Poor Clara -- she has a cold. I hope it does not morph into anything else, sweetie. Liquids and vitamin C, hurry!! I feel much better today. It rained this morning in the wake of another cold front. I've been up for over three hours now. I drove A to school. I think she was ready to go back, but she really didn't want to give up her vacation lifestyle of being able to stay up until 10:00 and sleeping until 8:00. How easily they become spoiled. N went off to work. Then I drove T-man to work. Now the house is quiet and warm. I'm ready to get my energy back.

I found a new group of artists to hang out with in cyberspace. Discussion yesterday had to do with avoidance of stagnation. How do we prevent stagnation, not just as artists, but in our mundane lives? Well, we rearrange the furniture. We change our hair color or style. We change partners. We change palettes. We change media and materials. We change our route to work. We change where we live. We change channels. We stop eating meat. We start eating meat. We change our perception of the world around us. It doesn't have to be anything drastic, but just enough change to keep things from being SSDD. The mundane is the enemy.

If you bead, preventing stagnation can be something as innocuous as throwing a few beads of a sharply contrasting color into your pieces or using a different stitch or using a combination of stitches or going with an entirely different palette for a few months. After all, Picasso had his blue period and his yellow period, etc. Why can't a beader have different color periods? Mix materials you wouldn't normally mix, like plastic (gasp) and glass, crystal and anodized aluminum. Change is not difficult, but it can be frightening. Close your eyes, hold your nose and jump in.

So here is the question for the day: What do you do to prevent stagnation in your world?