Hey - where's the toilet?

We are having new hardwood floors installed. I've never done this before. Any work that needed to be done or renovation that were needed I pretty much did my self, and conned Rick into getting involved. This time we are having the entire first floor of the house redone. That entails ripping up tile and carpet and my painted floors. Let me just say right now - I did not think this through. In the last house I ripped about about 6' x 8-10' of tile with a hammer and chisel. It was a horrible job and Rick and I both swore we would never EVER do that again - so we hired out the demo this time, thankfully. Apparently that was such a traumatic experience that I just shoved it out of my memory and happily plod right on into this project with out much thought at all! So in the morning I let the crew in and left to run errands and go to painting class. On my way home I had to go to the bathroom REALLY a lot - so I hurried home ran in the house and saw this!

OK - SHOCK! - First indication that I didn't think about this or plan well enough - no problem - I ran to the powder room and saw this!




What??? Where's the toilet??? Second indicator that I really have not planned well ... so I opened the coat closet to hang up my coat before I ran upstairs to the bathroom and look what I found!!!



I didn't dare laugh as hard as I wanted to or would've wet my pants for sure. I headed up stairs only to find all access thoroughly taped off and sealed with plastic, plus an extreme amount of dust and crud stuck to the plastic just waiting to apply itself to the first available sucker that even tried to pry it from it's guard post protecting the stairs and upstairs rooms - so back to the "toilet closet" - grab my coat and SPEED to Rick's office! I did not plan well at all - but this will be so cool when it is done!

No Art For Me....

The last 2 days have been spent entirely on the computer. I enjoy doing this but since I am completely unschooled in computers the learning curve is steep and slow. I compare it to working a 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle, only a little more fun and rewarding. When I am done with a jigsaw puzzle - (an annual family Christmas tradition)- all I have is a puzzle put together. When I am done with my computer adventures I have actually learned stuff I can use again - much better. SO what have I learned? I learned how to get my paintings on eBay and link to them from my blog, learned about widgets, blog rolling, sort of learned what chicklets are but I'm still not sure of the difference between widgets and chicklets for certain. I learned about feed burning and put a feed burner on my site and a feed reader on my computer and transferred all of my favorite blogs from my bookmark folder to the feed burner and figured out how to work it - WOW - does that make things easier and FAST too! This is all working toward driving traffic to my site since I can't really be successful at selling my work online if no one can find it. I looked at a tone of other artists sites to try to learn how seemingly more successful artists are doing it. I compared a dozen or so "on line gallery" sites, like ArtSpan and Yessy and Imagekind etc. I have decided to get accounts on Yessy and also one other one whose name escapes me at this moment. I think I will try them for a year or so and see what kind of response I get.

I reviewed the first month of "2008-The Year of Self Discipline and Will Power" and made some good discoveries. This is a little of what I learned: I have made a few small improvements. I forgot most of what I was trying to accomplish. I need to review at least weekly and not monthly. I need to set measurable and definable goals. I can't know progress in anything if I don't have start and finish lines. I still have a lot of work to do but I am encouraged. And yes - I am proud of myself for taking on this task for this year and for trying to make some improvements. No self-condemnation allowed this year. One of my goals is to become more interesting...uh, can someone tell me where is the start and finish line for that one is?

I am seriously in need of some painting time - but there is so much going on this month - I am down to 2 weeks to get new hardwoods installed on the first floor, new carpeting upstairs, paint the house inside-the entire first floor and stairwell and upstairs hall, get moldings installed, pack and prepare for 2 weeks in Egypt and return home to guests staying with us, who will arrive the day before we get back! Then it will be into March! This is all fun stuff too - but I am really feeling the NEED to make some art, and as Martha Stewart would say - "that's a good thing."