Friday, May 3, 2019

Notebook Entry: Project Status

For years I have kept a notebook. Who knew, at the time, that keeping a Planner would become all the rage. For me, the habit began in the mid-1980’s, after reading Disciplines of a Beautiful Woman by Anne Ortlund. One of the many things I record in my notebook is a fairly frequent “inventory” of the status of all my projects.

Yes, I say all my projects, because they are legion. So, it helps to keep a record of where I am, as regards the projects. At different points in time, I am more or less obsessed with certain of the projects. So, it’s not that I do all of them every day. My projects include (but are not limited to) family history, scrapbooking, Bible art journaling, life journaling (I have my life story, hundreds of pages in Word documents, more recently updated with the Day One app), organizing and maintaining two homes, cooking, baking, piano, and art (for awhile it was mixed media but now almost exclusively watercolor, as I am just learning).

So I have always found it helpful to make lists in my notebooks, because writing it down somehow makes it feel less overwhelming. I suppose I feel that if I can write down what all I need to do, it then becomes doable. 

Current status:
Scrapbooking - I had gotten quite behind with my annual scrapbook for 2019, as I had taken on a project of doing a separate scrapbook of our great grandson’s first year. I finished that while we were still in Washington (he turned one in March), but after we returned to Missouri, I had all the many pictures from January through April to organize, edit, print (some) and put in the scrapbook. I would like not to get that far behind again, because it was quite a chore to get those four months finished. I am up to date now, as of a couple of days ago.

Art/craft supply and studio organization - This was a biggie, as I reorganized the studio with my watercolor art supplies, cleaning out mixed media supplies (a much messier hobby) and making my work area much more pleasant. I also filled several boxes with craft supplies I no longer use from my hobby room storage closet, to give away. Whew!

So now, in terms of art, I am free to enjoy watercolor. I admit to a bit of an obsession with wildlife right now, and especially birds, as we so enjoy watching them at our feeders, out our bedroom bay windows (looking down on the feeders and the woods). A couple of days ago we saw our first Indigo Bunting of the season. Today, the Grosbeaks returned. We are enjoying using a new (to us) app, Merlin Bird ID, that our son told us about.


This little Carolina wren took my eye, in a painting by watercoloursbyrachel. We have these wrens in our Wonder Forest. One of them has built a nest in a little house we have nailed to a tree, right under our bedroom windows that look out over the woods. My rendition of this wren is a poor copy of Rachel’s work, but I am learning, and with this attempt I did learn that the quality of the watercolor paper does make a huge difference (my first time to use Arches cold press paper).

So, these days, I keep myself busy with projects, but we also spend time keeping up with our families in Missouri and Washington, our church involvement, watching Cardinals baseball, and going out and about in our woods and our community.

#CarolinaWren #ArchesWatercolorPaper #notebook #journaling #projects


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