A Busy Mind Is A Good Thing

This is my palette... a hinged plastic box with assorted paint pots. A puddle of water in the bottom keeps the humidity up so the paints only need an occasional spritz of water to stay moist. A drop or two of bleach prevents mold. The jars are Nova Paints, the butter cups contain Golden. Lids from large containers of cole slaw serve as individual color mixing palettes. My brushes, not shown here, are quality 1" -2.5" Wooster china bristle from Lowes, a building supply store. But I use a lot of the throw-away types as well. They generally sit in a bucket of water, are cleaned only occasionally and are seldom allowed to dry out.

Funny how it happens... the more involved I become, the busier my mind with everyday problem solving, the more productive I actually seem in the studio. With the eminent closing of the lake house and all the mental baggage it brings, studio work seems to flow smoothly, puzzles are solved, direction is clear. This is not to say I've signed off on a bunch of completed paintings, just that good things are happening. The flip side is that if I slack off, and don't have much on my plate, studio work is uninspired and dead ended. So I deduce that the conscious must be busy elsewhere for the subconscious to perform creatively.

Now, if J should read this, he would question my 'busyness' as I don't appear to be any busier than usual, I just talk a good line. But my mind is in a whirl with details that we didn't expect to have to deal with. Not the money end... that's J's bucket of worms, but how will we use this house, furnish it, deal with it from a distance and the myriad of questions that ensue. Like... okay, we will only subscribe to $10 basic cable since we aren't big TV junkies but do need morning and evening news. How about Internet? Well, for $50-75 a month, I think we will have to do without. Dial-up won't work because we'll just use our cells. I checked for hotspots my laptop might access and seems the nearest one is a McDonald's, can you believe! and not a whole lot more in the area. Would think that being so close (5 miles) to a major university there would be all sorts, but maybe they just aren't listed. Then there's the option of walking around using the laptop like a divining rod, looking for free wi fi.

And speaking of computers... I've been going through old albums of pics taken while we lived in the lake house. Here is my very first 'computer' setup... a TI-99 hooked up to an old b&w TV. That's twenty some years ago, boys and girls!

PS: The plant still lives! Just realized it's the same shefflera we've been carrying around from house to house!