Mosaic Mural

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Town of Cochrane Mural Mosaic

Check out that site. You can click on each mosaic, which is a painting in itself. Be sure to scroll around the site a bit, it shows the assembly of this mural and others. Very cool! (Thanks, Uncle John.)

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I lasted until 3:30 at work yesterday, then a bunch of us left. I was surprisingly productive. I have to admit, in years past I have spent that day being irritated by the fact that the office was open and overly focused on figuring out when I can leave. The only thing I can figure that was different about yesterday was that I've had a bunch of time off lately with the various craft shows, so it felt okay to be at work.

I'll sort of be glad when this Dec 1 craft show is over so I can bear down and get things accomplished at work as well as at home. There are places in our house I am dying to reorganize and declutter, but I just can't take the time yet - namely Simon's old room. Shocking isn't it - he never came back to finish clearing every little piece of left-behind crap? I bugged him about it incessantly when he first moved out, then I gave up. I decided I wanted to do it myself and do it right. Actually it's part of a chain of events I want to make happen.

I want to clean out Simon's room so we can move the den into that room. Then, the den, which had been my studio originally, will be my new gallery. It's a tiny room with no closet where I'll store my Pine Tree Designs work, displayed attractively, so customers can stop in to pick stuff up. It's an idea I had a few months ago that just wouldn't go away. I even spent a little time looking into the zoning laws - not enough to understand them completely, but I didn't read anything to stop me. The Christmas tree farm next to us sells to the public from their property so I think a gallery open to the public might even be okay eventually.

In my mind, it was half gallery for customers and half it was a way for me to eye my inventory and know what I needed to focus on making. But after this museum show I received an email from a woman who bought stuff from me who wanted more stuff and asked if she could come to my studio to discuss what she wanted. So we have an appointment for Dec 9. I won't have the gallery set up by then but it kind of gave me a nudge that the gallery is the right thing to do. I have it pictured in my mind. I can't wait!

The thing about having a "den" kills me - because we never use it. Well I've never used it, I should say. We have other rooms to meet our needs. We have a living room with a fireplace and no TV. We have a family room with a gigantic HD TV. This den is just a room set up with a TV and futon we had no other place for when Simon moved his room downstairs and I moved my studio into his old bedroom. Steve did use it once in a great while when Simon lived here to watch TV if Simon and his friends were using the big TV for video games. I think he also used it just to prove to me it was useful.

It makes me sad to go in there for some reason. I think it's because when it was my studio, I painted the walls a lovely sage green and stamped copper leaves here and there on the walls. I still love those walls. And now it's a "guy's den" with model cars and dinosaur posters on the walls. It's just wrong, I tell you!

Before we set up Simon's old room as a den, I'm going to talk to Steve about it again. If he doesn't use the current den, what makes him think he'll go downstairs and use it? He has this thing about making every area of the house useful. My theory is it's okay to leave stuff empty until a purpose for it becomes clear. I'm always saying, "Let's live with it a while and see what happens," where he's always, "What can we use this for now?" Different strokes.

Time to get to work. I'm so happy to have zero commitments today so I can work on making inventory. I literally had nightmares all night about The Enchanted Rose Garden. That's the store in Penfield where I rent space. I have to work there tomorrow afternoon so I'm trying to get enough Christmas stuff (cards & pins) made to take with me. I've neglected my space there horribly because there are only so many hours in the day. My nightmares were that the owner was mad at me for not attending to my space and updating it with Christmas stuff yet. And when I went there, I only had one Sticky Notes pad left so my space looked horrible and pathetic.

This is my mantra: I'm doing the best I can, I'm doing the best I can.

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