Piles

I had to fight the urge to sit and color in the floor, to balance all the volume of the forms a bit, help settle it in space, especially the table. Mmm, maybe later.


OMG, no, I don't draw these freehand. I rough-in sketches and work on proportion (or, not) with pencil and go over it with pen, then take out the pencil lines with a kneaded eraser.

The past 5 days, we’ve been recovering from some kind of stomach ailment/flu/bug. You know it’s bad when neither one of us wants to eat. I mean, seriously. You’d think that padding around all day, napping, it might be nice and soothing to draw, but no! (Gasp!)
See? I told you it was bad.

I can (but probably shouldn’t) work through a cough, sniffles and allergy attacks and fever. But, when I’ve got a seriously upset stomach and can’t eat, well, heck, there’s no point in facing the rest of the world until I can eat and have more energy. Bleh!

um, yeah. Bleh, indeed.

I’ve had plenty of chicken soup (canned), saltines and jello (talk about comfort food) for a while. Feeling better today, though, much better, Thanks.

I’m having to dig through my backpack to figure out what I had last done before the intestinal unhappiness, what I need to do to follow up with that stuff, and what was is that I had to do today? I dunno. I have piles of binders, with papers from different jobs and classes. I’ll get home from the day, unload one group of binders and books from one school, plunk it down on the floor. Then I grab stuff from the other school and class and load it into my pack. If I’m ambitious, I slip in a sketchbook and work files. Everyday, it’s something different, a different pile of stuff. After even just a few days, it’s like an archeological dig on the floor of my office; the deeper I go into the piles, the further back in my most recent past I can investigate and figure out where the heck my brain was.

I knew I was in trouble this morning when I went digging, thinking, “Now, where are my brushes…”.

Sigh.

You know what I want? I’d really like one job. Maybe two. I have the two, and then freelance, and then the faculty council, and then recruiting, and then the professional design society. I don't want to sound ungrateful or anything, but I’d like to be able to pack my bag with just one, mostly unchanging load of books and ideas, and go about my days. I’d like to be in one place often enough during the weeks to actually have co-workers. That would be really, really great.

Sigh.

Today I need to get back to documenting the stuff I’d compiled from Monday (it was remarkably a good, industrious day, apparently. I’d forgotten), and from the conference, already a couple of weeks ago. Good grief! The conference, for industrial designers, had great talks about design thinking and education and creativity and imagination and all that good stuff. I have lots of scribbles on talks in the little moleskine they gave us in our registration packets. I need to get to transcribing that, because there are really great thoughts to share and to think about. I wish they’d just collect slides from the speakers and publish them. In the meantime, we all have our notes, furiously scribbled in moments of inspiration. Little seeds, waiting to germinate.But right now, I have to take a shower, grab my first coffee in a couple days, and tackle some of this work stuff.

... Want to read about someone doing really tremendous good? Visit Jane.