Wait… Come Back

It’s become a victim of plurk-preoccupation. Not to mention I’ve been sick with a narsty sinus infection that wanted to develop into bronchitis… I may be fending that off.

All is well, really… well, besides being knocked on my arse since last Friday by this stinkin’ virus. I’m working on a new web project for a new client, I’m developing a new class called “Visual Journaling for the Intimidated,” which will be an in-person class at first and will be online in a while. I’m working on a new blog and watching the hubster play the stock market to earn us some dough for our trip to Greece in September. So far so good!

Link Love Mondays will be back next week.

After lamenting for a very long time about my little “problem” with follow-through, a great gal on plurk mentioned that these “action sheets” from Behance are great for getting down ideas and planning projects. Not just planning, cuz I can do that all day and never end up with a finished product, but the goal is getting down the action items. Once I got down concrete items to DO, I did. And two projects are now on pretty Behance Action Sheets (I downloaded the action sheet to test it out & then bought a pack).

So now I have my new blog (under wraps for now - gotta keep the secret close ’till launch) designed, permission granted from appropriate parties & a few blog entries written. My second project is an art journaling for the uninitiated class - based on spiritual principles. It’s a repeatable 4-week class based around a certain theme, each class building on art journaling techniques culminating in a full-on collaged art journal entry at the end. So I have themes listed and class outlines for each week.

And I got a part-time web dev job to be my “good enough” job - gives me enough $$ for living and enough time to do the other stuff I love so much.

So, are there any tricks you use to manage your multiple interests (if you’re one of “those people” who can’t seem to find just one thing to focus on?).

Here are a few videos I’ve been watching on YouTube…
Love Yourself, Love Your Art:

Happy Dance:

Getting Through “teh suck”:

There’s a new-ish feature of WordPress that I decided to play with today. It’s the category to tag converter. My impression of the feature was that it would preserve my categories and just add the new tags that were made to the appropriate posts. Once I hit the “category to tag converter” link, I thought I was so clever… all my posts would be categorized AND tagged.

But alas… 270 posts are now uncategorized, but I have a nifty new tag cloud in my sidebar. *grumble*

I just joined a new group called the “Plurkette Hencircle” made up of gals (and possibly a token rooster ) on Plurk who are committed to the values in this book: Cookbook, Ideabook, Lifebook and the Farmgirl Sisterhood.

I don’t have the book and probably won’t until later this month, but I’ve been wanting to grow some of my own food, and haven’t had the motivation or the know-how. There’s also a bit of the sisterhood aspect that appeals to me - having a cheering section and people to cheer for is something I’ve been working on for a while. And I’m always up for something new! I have a house, land and I work from home so I’m sure I can get some of this stuff in action.

I put a new dress on the blog this weekend - I may play around with a few more different looks until I find a new one that suits me.

Here are some juicy links to start out your week:

How to Create a Custom Apple iPhone Website Icon, If you want to link your blog to check on comments while you’re afk or if you’ve developed your own iPhone Web App, here’s how to make your own icon so it’ll show up nice n’ pretty like the others on your iPhone.

Akashiya Sai Watercolor Brush Pen from Jet Pens. These look like they’d be fun to use in my journals.

Jing is free & only saves in SWF which can be problematic. It links up with Screencast.com, a paid service to store and share slideshows & such. I like Jing’s no-frills interface and cross-platform-ness but I really dislike the file format and the fact that they seem to be in bed with Screencast.

The other screen capture program that looks promising (and is only $9 until July 4th 2008), is Sequence by a French company called App4Mac. It’s still in Beta but at $9 it’s a steal. It’s crashed on my mac a couple times and the way to end your recording isn’t as intuitive as I’d like but it works & works well - and saves as a Quicktime Movie so you can edit it in iMovie.

I recorded a little video with Jing - here it is:

Thanks to Usingmac.com.

Here’s number 2! They say it takes about 30 days to create a new habit… let’s see if this one sticks!

So here are a few links from my web explorations last week - a little scattered, no theme like last time:

Theo Ellsworth is a self-taught artist and in his words:

He has a miniature city inside of his head that is overrun with funny monsters, yet he still manages to come across as a semi-normal guy.

I’ve been trying to get in touch with him via email all last week since I want to get a hold of some of his books, but his inbox is apparently full. So I broke down and went all old-school - used paper, pen and a stamp.

Plurk - If you need another social whosawhatsit, this is one of the newest (to me at least) and possibly most addicting (yes, more addicting than Twitter) one out there. You not only can follow your friends’ plurks, but you can respond to them and see others’ response as well. You earn “Karma” points for doing things like Plurking something interesting, having people respond to your Plurks, using photos, videos or emoticons in your Plurks. You can also get different colored stars for recruiting people to Plurk (yes, the link to Plurk is one that’ll get me stars…).Yay for another time sink.

Five Plants to Repel Mosquitoes. I have the perfect yard for breeding mosquitoes. Every summer they swarm in droves and they’re so tough, they eat DEET. My plan for the next time I actually get out of the house is to buy some of these supposedly mosquito-repelling plants and put them on my deck.  I would love to go outside and not be afraid of being carried away and sucked dry by those nasty little vampires.

I’m one of the lucky who don’t have to sit in traffic for 2+ hours every day to get to work, but I am feeling the pinch when I go fill up my tank. The hubster and I are considering installing a water-based fuel saver system in our cars once our engineer friend perfects his to save some money.

Because we’re not drilling in our own country for oil, we’re super-dependent on other countries. It’s almost pathetic that we have to beg OPEC to increase production in order to meet our demand. And prices still rise. Conservation won’t cut it. We’re a modern mobile society, and the cost of transportation (i.e. fuel) is hurting us everywhere. While people are screaming for us at home to conserve, they turn a blind eye at the increase in consumption in countries like India and China who are in the midst of a crazy economic boom.

So we MUST drill at home. Since oil prices in the market are usually based on future supply (or lack therof), just the act of saying we’re going to drill at home will drive prices down because of the potential future increase in supply.

I’m all for alternative energy sources (don’t get me started on nuclear power), but these are only in their infancy, and probably won’t be as efficient and relatively inexpensive — cost of vehicles, that is — until the the next decade or so. In addition to perfecting alternative energy, we need to drill now to save our asses from working to pay for our gas (and taxes — but that’s another post).

Sign the petition at American Solutions and really think about our future.

Working from home gives me lots of little perks (and having a husband at home to… *wink*), and being able to nap when I need to is one of them. SARK, an artist, and productivity gurus around the web have been singing the praises of naps — how our bodies are made for napping and that we can tap into our creativity more easily if we nap during the day — not to mention the subsequent increase in productivity.

I don’t go to bed ’till after 1am most nights and wake up between 8 and 9 am, so according to this Boston Globe graphic, my ideal nap time would be around 2:30-3:30 PM.

So embrace the nap!