My yearly goal for 2022 is to do art every month. I did a pencil drawing of a cat for January (and drew a self-portrait for a work contest that I can’t share yet), but for this month, I brought out my old collage book and did a spread. I still have most of my scrapbooking stuff: boxes and drawers and holders stuffed with cool textured papers, and stickers and ephemera. I just went back and looked and the last time I did a spread in the collage book was 2006.
2006!
!!!
That was SIXTEEN years ago.
What the actual hell?? How is that even possible? How could that much time have gone by since the last time (that I remember) I was creative??
In 2006, Martin was 9 and Karin was 7. Things were busy. But honestly, that seems crazy, considering that things were busy for the 9 years prior to that, with 2 small children and house-building. What the heck have I been doing with myself for SIXTEEN YEARS? I’ve been reading, and working, and playing games, and writing (intermittently) here. I’ve been raising two children to adulthood, and joining choirs, and walking walking walking, and for the last two, I’ve been living through a pandemic. Everyone else was baking bread and learning languages and playing Wordle, but not me. I was hunkered down, but my creative well was apparently completely dry.
What’s even sadder is that I apparently started my collage book in 2005 or 2004 and if the last time I worked on it was May of 2006, then I barely lasted two years before setting it aside for SIXTEEN years.
Two weekends ago, I did a page, and yesterday I did another. That brings me to a total of 19 pages. There are a lot of empty pages left, though! We shall see how many more I devote my 2022 monthly art project to. It feels good to put on my creative thinking cap and make pretty things again.
Here is a link to see the first 17 pages: http://www.lizardek.com/spotlight/collagebook/index.html
And here are the two latest: https://www.instagram.com/p/CaNSwJFKgN9/
***
I got up this morning, showered and dressed, and fired up my computer at my desk in Karin’s room, only to find that I couldn’t connect via VPN to work. Then a message came through on Teams that due to a cybersecurity attack, all our company’s systems were shut down and we couldn’t work from home if we needed internet. Email wasn’t working either. Even going into the office wouldn’t help because though I could have then connected to the servers, our helpdesk system is internet-based and it is also unavailable. So, we’ve spent the entire day (it’s now 3 pm) waiting on IT to give us the all-clear…which has yet to happen as i write this. GAH! Agonizing to be put a whole day behind on my work to-do list through no fault of my own. I hope our IT department can get it fixed so we can work tomorrow.
In the meantime, I have emptied the dishwasher, refilled it, repaired a hole in a pair of pants, paid the bills, eaten lunch with Martin, driven him to the bus station for work, put the finished jigsaw puzzle back in the box, gotten the AIC newsletter done in HTML and reviewed by my editor, read several chapters of my book, played TwoDots, checked Teams obsessively, and written this post.
Maybe I should work on another page or two of my collage book?