ten good things

[kaberett]

1. Oven still isn't getting all the way up to temperature but the new seal has improved matters significantly, and my new griddle iron is serving v well as a Basis for Bread, having now handled both soda bread and a loaf of sourdough Acceptably.
   
2. Flying ants are, it turns out, actually quite pretty if... you are existing immediately adjacent to the nest they're all trying to get away from.
   
3. I spent a whole bunch of this afternoon sat on the grass in a friend's back garden, messing about with watercolour pencils that I didn't actually have to try, and thinking about shame and failure and vulnerability and drawing and my desire to have the courage to Make (More) Bad Art, and what I can do to foster and facilitate that.
   
4. I have successfully dropped off birthday presents for my mother (having left my Cambridge keys in London, whoops, but it was only a flying visit), having Even wrapped them (courtesy of said crafternoon). These consisted of (1) a Peter Igelhoff CD (with another to come, because it hadn't alas arrived by the time we set off this morning) and (2) some (second-hand, aged) geological maps of areas relevant to her interests, which I acquired as a result of a completely incidental detour into the BGS shop at the NHM. (Alas they'd sold out of linen-backed maps of The Town Of Her Actual Birth, but I still did pretty well.)
   
5. The new car... has a frankly completely ridiculous sunroof... that extends all the way over the passenger seats. It! Is ridiculous! And also it is SKY and I am very fond of it.
   
6. There is an excellent crescent moon.
   
7. A very kindly took me into South Ken this morning, before we headed up for our flying visit to Cambs, such that I didn't have to get up ludicrously early for the ridiculous solo round-trip; I successfully did (well, progressed) science, and was brought COOKIES by A & B, who had gone on a wander while I disappeared into my basement lair.
   
8. I have plans for More Science next week, and am looking forward to it, because for all the many difficulties I really do enjoy being in lab.
   
9. I am finding my current book enormously engaging, like, "it's an ebook I have from the library so I've got out an actual notebook to scribble down my thoughts about it because I can't usefully annotate it directly and I want to remember things, also maybe I'm going to buy a copy once I've established how much it pisses me off" levels of engaging. Thoughts aren't coalescing yet, but I've got lots of points to jump off.
   
10. Even and especially when fraught or difficult or hard topics come up, A & I have built & are building really robust patterns of kindness with and trust in each other, and I am very grateful for this.
    

Comments

[sonia]

A & I have built & are building really robust patterns of kindness with and trust in each other

So lovely to hear that!

[kaberett]

I mean we just spent an hour crying on the sofa as part of that process, but it does constitute progress...

[sonia]

Oh. Sorry to hear that, and glad to hear things are overall getting better.

[worlds_of_smoke]

♥

[vass]

<3

I spent a whole bunch of this afternoon sat on the grass in a friend's back garden, messing about with watercolour pencils that I didn't actually have to try, and thinking about shame and failure and vulnerability and drawing and my desire to have the courage to Make (More) Bad Art, and what I can do to foster and facilitate that.

Excellent goal. Same here.

There's a relevant Tumblr post I saw somewhere and can't find right now but will go back looking for: it's about drawing practice. The OP answered an ask about how you get good at art by telling the anon to Just Practise. Another artist reblogged that and pointed out how unhelpful and frustrating that was... and then actually gave detailed instructions on exercises that aspiring artists can do. Things like working in crayon (as in the large plastic things toddlers draw with, not artist crayons) or drawing a bunch of random blobs and then turning them all into Pikachu, or drawing a group of circles and then connecting them with lines to form a figure but trying to stick to the circles as much as possible. There was more but that's what I remembered.

What struck me most was how fun and doable it sounded, and it makes me think there's something in that which could be generalised to other art forms too, something something small low stakes practice sessions with an achievable goal and some creative constraints to make things interesting-but-still-doable.

[sfred]

<3 (especially at #10)

I appreciate your running commentary

[jesse_the_k]

on Life with Lovers. It's educational! <3

[cesy]

<3