Ok so this isn’t the post I was going to put up next. But it’s the one I want to write and post right now. I’ve had an interesting, fun, and sometimes frustrating couple of weeks. That have culminated in a weekend with time that I really needed.
I couple of weeks ago I was asked to attend an event that turned out to be part of a school project for one of the young people I take Taekwondo with. As part of it they had an early Holi celebration, which for this event meant throwing colored powder at each other and generally enjoying getting a bunch of color all over each other. It was fun. And not entirely dissimilar to painting in soft pastels for me. Though I don’t usually manage to get them quite all over, I don’t think I’ve ever got it in my ear, but who knows.
On the way home from that my car decided to continue to plague me with the random, unidentifiable check engine light. The car trouble started when I took it in to get the tires checked and some general maintenance done so I could take it to Asheville, which I didn’t do. By the time of the light coming on after the event, and then going off a couple of hours later, it became apparent that the car was trying to break up with me. Fine. That meant finding a new vehicle.
The car was paid for. I had no car payment. I really wasn’t looking forward to getting a new car and having that payment again. But it really was time to call it quits with that car. So, I set about looking online to decide where I wanted to start the search. But my week was tight. I didn’t think I’d be able to look until the weekend. That is not what happened.
I inadvertently sent an inquiry to one of the dealers when I tried to find out what my car would be worth. Fortunately, it was a dealer with a car I liked. I got called the next morning asking about what I was looking for etc. They had something that fit my requirements and I could come look at it in my 2-hour window after work. Can you see how this is going? Yeah. I went and looked. Liked the car. Put a down payment because well it was the only one of that color and I didn’t want black, white, silver, or grey. I was late to my thing that was the end of my 2-hour window, but it worked out ok. I went back to the dealer after the dentist, two days later, and did the paperwork for the car. I didn’t spend my weekend looking for a car, which was awesome. I’m not sure I remember what I did with my weekend at this point. Some things are a bit of a blur. But it wasn’t looking for a car.
With the car problem solved I was a little more relaxed going into the days long upgrade process I was to start at the day job. I’d explain all the ins and outs of why this was a big deal and why it wasn’t a big deal in detail but that would be long and possibly boring to read. So, the short. Ish. We were trying to do an in-place upgrade of a system that I am responsible for and is historically fussy. I have a set of ‘practice’ servers for this, and I work with a vendor who has much more extensive experience with the software so I wasn’t all alone in this. I had one of our server engineers take ‘snapshots’ of the servers so if something went wrong, we wouldn’t have to rebuild the server, just rollback. Best decision I could have made. There are two servers that work together for this system and we managed to crash both of them hard. Hard, hard. So hard that we couldn’t boot into windows and even a repair failed. Rollback time. Try again, what did we do. Yeah, no joy. We did the same thing. But at this point we had an idea of what caused it so for the next try we crashed just one server to verify.
This is where all plans for this upgrade got completely trashed. We can’t do an in-place upgrade. There is good and bad to this. The good, it will be more beneficial for the business users as it will be a little less disruptive. The bad, in means a lot, a lot more work for me. That’s fine.
I had a meeting with my manager a day or so after the misadventure of the upgrade and he suggested that I take Monday (day after Easter) off. I have the time that’s not an issue, but I was back and forth. Until I realized this. My manager is former military. A commanding officer at that. And I imagine that if we were military, he would have means to make sure I took Monday off, but as we are not, he can’t force that I take the time off, he can only strongly recommend. I took Monday off. It was a great decision.
Which brings me to the title of this post. Time. I got two really valuable gifts of time this weekend. The first was that my Taekwondo class for Saturday was cancelled. My Master took the weekend as a holiday. This worked out because even though I know I could ‘skip’ class, I rarely do. And this meant I didn’t feel guilty for not going to class. The second was of course having Monday off. I used the time well.
I spent the weekend mostly arting. Yes, art is a verb.
I managed to finish two pieces, nearly finish a third, and start a fourth. I also did start and finish an experiment. I did some additional experimenting, on that fourth piece, and have a bunch of ideas of what and how I want to do the next pieces. I’m really excited about them. I can’t wait to get working on them.
The one piece that is almost finished gets to wait until I get to a stopping point on the fourth piece because that’s watercolor and the fourth piece is pastel and really messy. I need to clean in between working on the two. I’ve got pastel everywhere, though not in my ears, I don’t think.
The only thing about having all these ideas for paintings or art pieces I want to do is that, there just aren’t enough hours in the day and I don’t have enough surfaces in my place to be working on too many at once. Though it’s not like that’s a big problem as some of these progress pretty quickly and they tend to keep my attention really well. Even to the point of getting worked on during my lunch time. Which reminds me of an IG post that redefines the starving artist concept. She says that we’re not starving artists because we can’t afford to eat, it’s because we put food on to cook, go to do just one tweak to a painting and come back to burnt food. Or, in my case, don’t get to eat right away because I have to go back to work and into a meeting. I can live with this. I really can. And I am honestly all smiles about it.
What’s next for me? I’m going to be finishing up the watercolor painting and the fourth painting, which as I mentioned, is pastel. And I want to finish up the bigger experiment that I started last year. Mostly because I need/want that board for another project that I would like to start. I’m also cleaning out my technical pens which isn’t really exciting and rather more embarrassing to realize I neglected them so badly. I’ll be posting more on Instagram and I’m making efforts to post more on Facebook, and I’m working on some other options for sharing my artwork. If you get this blog and don’t already know, I have a fine art prints store at: http://susanmichelleartist.com . I’ll be posting much of the art I’ve been working on the store once I get it photographed.
That’s it for me this time. I will be getting back to a more regular schedule with my blog posts, I just haven’t decided what the frequency will be so stay tuned, and thank you for sticking with me.
Cheers!