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I have never adapted to using my mobile phone for internet use. In fact, I have never even learned to send text messages on my mobiles phone. My main excuse for not doing that is that the keyboard on my several years old, mobile phone is too small to allow for easy texting. 

I intend to upgrade to an Iphone or a full keyboard phone, I am not sure what I want. I am currently looking around, trying to decide what phone to get. 

Many of my friends are buying an unlocked phone so they have full choice of internet provider and I am unsure if I want to do this or to get a phone for a discount price along with a two-year plan with a phone and internet provider.

When any of my friends chat, about their new phones, I am ‘all ears’.

I am letting everyone know ‘I will be in the market for a new phone soon’, as I want to learn all the advantages of the different types, so I make the best decision for my own use, one that will give me additional use, especially ease of texting, but will not greatly increase my monthly expenditure.

I hope to learn more from my own friends, before I make this decision. 
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My husband Reg is getting fitter every day. He is working out using the Wii, mostly at the balance games and some on the spot jogging. He has his Wii age down from 75, (which came as a shock as his actual age is 69,) to 59 or -10, his actual age.  We were both so pleased with that result and how much more freely he is moving.  I was thinking if he could now jog on the spot for 20 minutes it was time I bought him his first pair of good running shoes, since he was a teenager and ran marathons. 

My man tends to buy $20. Chain store special shoes and having once had a spinal injury, and having a curvature of the spine and arthritis, I believe the difference it will make to his health and movement to be fitted professionally for a good pair of well cushioned and supporting shoes, will be worth far more than the cost factor.

These are what I bought him.

 
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Trance™9
From the pr blurb on the Brooks Running Shoes, web site:- Quote:- 'You’ve come to expect big things from this shoe. The Trance™ 8 introduced BioMoGo to the world, and the Trance™ 9 unveiled our improved Progressive Diagonal Rollbar (PDRB®), delivering unsurpassed cushioning and effortless but supportive heel-to-toe transitions. Jam-packed with premium plushness (say that ten times fast), the Trance™ 9 remains worthy of your highest expectations. Width DSupport Category This category represents the shoes best suited for the majority of the running population.'

Now for unique gifts for her in this day of retail therapy, I have been watching one of my favourite dress stores, a little country town boutique, I drive past regularly and noticing the20% off Sale, on the window, ever since Christmas, but I have held out and waited until today, the 50% off sign was finally up.  I pulled over and out of four dresses I tried on three looked fabulous on me. Oh it is so nice to be out of the big girls clothing department and able to shop in boutiquesJ. It is three years since I was a size 22 to 24 and I LOVE the healthier fitter, me, even more than I love the being able to walk into any regular sizes dress boutique and find clothes that fit me.  

I selected the most practical dress for me, the one I will get the most use from, a day dress, sun frock. This dress is ideal for the coastal tour we will be enjoying this year.  This is what I love, buying, well-made, non mass-produced quality, when it is at chain store price.

But.Drum rolls........... The very BEST gift, I got was this morning when I did the fitness test in the Wii fit plus and it said my Wii age was down from my start of 62 years which was minus one year, from my actual 63 years of age, to ..........drum roll again J.  35 years Wii fit age. J  I am pleased with myself.  I feel it tooJ, I’ve never felt fitter or healthier in my life.  In this last three years of gradually increasing fitness activity, I am certain I have added over thirty years to my life.  What better gift could you give yourself?

 
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In my touring Caravan. Cardboard display rack of hand crafted, bookmarks created from the images of my art works.
Sign on my touring caravan door.

"Open Hours:

Open most days about 9 or 10. Occasionally as early as 7, and sometimes as late as 12 or 1.

We close about 5:30 or 6.

Occasionally about 4 or 5, and sometimes as late as midnight, or later.

 On somedays we're not here at all, but lately we've been here a lot, unless we're not here."
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Sign on my Summer Studio Retreat Door.

‘Closed’,

I will meet friends in face book, the park or the shopping mall for a coffee.

I am very busy continuing to work toward our 2010 tour of Eastern Australia.  I have organized cardboard displays, which I love, for the small handmade art cards and bookmarks we will have for sale direct from the artist, available only from our caravan, while on tour, on request. We will not be showing any of these items to people from our summer studio retreat as this is my creative time, not our interacting with people time. 

I know other creative vocation artists; will understand the need for a creative retreat, a time for an artist and writer to isolate themselves away with their work. My sister who is a writer and artist living in California lives in a log cabin in wilderness adjacent to a National Park, up the North Coast, past San Francisco. She mixes with people only at exhibitions and the theatre, this is how artist writers need to live, and even with this isolation, she tells me she is two years behind in her work. 

Somehow, I too, need to create this barrier of isolation during my time here in Victoria. I need this time to create, while I have access to larger studio space where I can spread out my work. I do not want to offend or reject offers of friendship, but my summer home and studio, is private.

The only address, I give out is that of one of my daughters, I cannot broadcast the address of a place that I advertise as being vacant for six months a year, while we tour.  I have no address on my business card. Our address is listed officially as ‘Highways of Australia, and in summer that’s opposite an oat field, near a lake, in the Goulburn Valley on private property, doesn’t even have a street that is listed on the map of the town and we are not ‘in’, for visitors, we are ‘in creative retreat’. It is not quite the ideal for the artist writer, log cabin, retreat, in the wilderness, my sister has, but it is ours and we love it and the privacy we seek for it.

I hope my friends will understand my need for creative retreat time and place. 
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Art Bookmarks, in cardboard display unit, in our touring caravan.
 
 
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I remembered a lesson I was taught and always remembered and use and have passed on to my students, like many lessons in one medium. you can apply it to any art form, and life itself.

I remembered this technique, the other day, when chatting with a friend about how we go through periods of indecision and lack of motivation in life.  I use it when I lack clarity in knowing what to do next.

It’s a simple technique; it simply requires you to ask yourself questions.  Just make sure your asking the right questions.

‘Ask the right question and you usually get the right answer’

If I relate this for a moment to how I learned the technique and taught it, as an artist, it was in response to ‘How the painter knows when a painting is finished?’

 Explanation: - The average unskilled art student and self taught artist, overworks a painting and ruins the potential it had with excessive work.  They keep finding more that can be done, to do in the work and they are never content with it, never feel it is ‘finished’. As a writer I am learning to apply what I have long known as a painter, to get to the point quickly and not ruin what I’m saying with excessive waffling. In life, it’s recognising what needs to be done and when it’s OK to step back and rest. When you look at a work in front of you, don’t say, “What more can I do”, because there is always more to be done, you could put birds in the sky, rocks on the ground, another blade of grass, there is never an end to the, ‘What more can I do’, question and the project goes downhill, looses the breath of fresh air, enthusiasm it started in and the multiple layers of paint result in a work that simply, cracks.  In life, If we keep looking at life with a ‘what more can I do’ question I think we become what is in danger of cracking. Sometimes the best thing to do, is nothing. J.  Be patient with yourself.

Try this question next time. It makes for great artists and some brilliant art works.

Step back and look at the picture from afar and ask the right question the question that on reflection should bring forth the right answer:- 'What more does it need'?.

What more does it NEED?If while you look at the work, the project on hand, you do not hear it ‘speak to you’, to tell you clearly, something it ‘NEEDS’ to have done to it, then STOP.

Towards the final phase of every great art work, of every life project, you reach the point where the plan has been made, the block in has been done, a little refining has been done and your now at the detail, fiddly bits stage, this is the stage when a good art teacher instructs you to do ‘more look than put’. I think that advice I learned can be used in all the art forms, including life. Most of my life mistakes have been from wanting to rush in, over commit and try to ‘fix things up’, rather than step back, observe, do a lot more looking on than putting on and asking, 'what more does it need', not 'what more can I do'?. Using my observations tool and looking back over my life, using that tool would have made me a better parent, and certainly have spared me the stroke, workaholism gave me, now that’s another story about someone who tried to fix everyone else’s problems instead of realizing if she didn’t care for herself, she would be no use to anyone. J.

Today I try to observe and make corrections before things reach that sort of breaking point.

An artist learns to put the brush down, take your mind off the project, walk around the block, get the mail, look at and smell some roses, sleep on it, turn it upside down, look at it through sun glasses, lol, J, take long breaks and come back and take a fresh look at it again, leave enough time after the block in and refinement stage so that you stop seeing the brush strokes you put down and see the overall picture.  Then, only when the work speaks to you, DEMANDS that it NEEDS something, do you know what finishing touch, detail, you can do to ‘lift’ the work and have it ready for your signature, COMPLETED.

 
 
 
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I worked hard yesterday afternoon and set up my home gallery and then I worked in my writer’s studio until 2am. 
I woke refreshed at 6am so I got up and began work again, thinking at the same time how I was doing what I have warned against in previous posts, 'getting on a creative high', and making a note that I must rest later today once I've completed my current creative writing assignment.

It is rare for me to be up before dawn and see the sun rise and it is most enjoyable, I think I should make it a permanent part of my life.  But can I?

I have been watching the mist rise over the oat field and the sun coming up and highlighting the creamy yellow green heads against the deeper green base, it seems only a week ago that they were just a short grass crop.  Reg and I fantasise as we always do when gazing out over a panorama, that this is all our land, our wealth, lol, well it is, we get to see the beauty of it and have none of the responsibility or work of planting maintenance harvest and sale of the crop, how much greater wealth is there that that?

It is chilly but beautiful. I think I could enjoy working in the morning peace at 'this time of day' but I would have to get my body’s rhythms set to get to bed by 10pm, unheard of for me.  At 63, can I make this change?

It is 7.15 am now and Reg has joined me. He is in his window seat armchair with is breakfast and the morning sun is streaming through our window, removing the crisp, chill in the air.  It is going to be a beautiful day here in Northern Victoria, and I am so pleased I did not miss a moment of its daylight beauty. :-)
 
 
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Reviewing my goals to becoming a better blogger.
Reviewing my action plans to share my creative skills though this blog.
Reviewing my action plan and ‘to do list’, to become a better blogger.

My work course on how to become a better blogger in 31 days has been met with some frustration as my server weebly was hit by a death ping attack and they were several days working around the clock bringing in experts and purchasing new servers, trying to overcome a denial of service attack.  Eventually they were forced to go to a great deal of expense providing a more powerful new server to counter this problem.  This threw me out of my late night work on the web routine and I began sitting inactively at the computer during what was previously, may be active afternoons.  Here i am today, mid afternoon and still at my computer.  How quickly do we slip back into non constructive bad habits?  What’s the point of trying to write a creative lifestyle blog, (this one), and two active lifestyle blogs, and becoming a sloth?

The work load to do my assignments in the 31 days to becoming a better blogger, has escalated and I find myself still striving to complete some of the preliminary work that is to get my own domain, for this blog pointing to the correct location and striving to get a google ranking for my new owned domain name artslim.org.   In the mean while I struggle to find time to exercise and keep up with my house work and I think it’s time to remind myself not to become obsessed in my creative work(in this instance, learning to have better blogs), to the extent where I fall back into a pattern of self physical neglect, and become sedentary again.    Keeping myself ‘in check’, staying motivated to self care as well as trying to help influence and motivate others not to make the same, becoming too inactive, mistakes I made in the past, due to a creative life, is why I started my http://www.artslim.org  blog.

So ‘I am here’, I’m just taking a step back from writing actual blog content while I learn more about how to improve how I do this and keep my time management principles  and slimming goals in mind.

A lot of the work I am doing at the moment is a once off effort that will be well rewarded in the future.  Like returning to studies, it’s worthwhile as long as I keep aware of maintaining a balanced lifestyle and make myself a definite, ‘clock on and off’ time.

I have completed 4 hours in studying how to be a better blogger so far today.  4 hours is the total time frame a day x 6 days a week,  I have set up in my action plan to have better blogs. As my set up phase, this initial 31 days is a 1/ priority of importance and urgency for me, I am prepared to double my allocated time now, and go back on line from 8pm till 12mn in the evening during the month of October, and this will then allow me two days a week off from writing for the remainder of the year which will bring me back to this job that I love, refreshed and eager to write.

Now having planned why I believe it will be OK to increase my computer study time and how I will credit myself with this extra time spent and made allowanced for how I will still fit in my physical activity and the bare bones of scaled back home maintenance, I’m happy with a new action plan with a definite upper cap, on how long a day I will allow myself to be sedentary, and a definite slotted in bed time.

Tips for creative people:-

*Make definite working hours, self employed creative work is never finished, you need to know in advance, when you intend to knock f, then ‘do it’.

*Decide in advance when you will go to bed and get up.  Self employed creative people can work around the clock on an adrenaline high, Bi Polar disorder is common amongst creative people and even can be mimicked in behaviour.  The highs associated with Bipolar can even be managed by pre setting obsessive tendency restraints in place.  If you don’t have ‘a boss’, when you are not ‘on a creative high’, set yourself restraints you believe will be in the interest of your own, physical and emotional health, while still allowing yourself to be highly creative.  Then when you are ‘on a creative high’, keep that action plan you have made, where you can see it, and ‘stick to it’.

Note:-  I come from a family of eccentric, highly creative people, believe me I know what I’m talking about here, obsessive creativity out of control, can be very self and family destructive, make reasonable limits and you will live longer, create more and enjoy the fruits of loving supporting relationships. It is worth curbing the extremes of our creative desires and your creations will not suffer, if you live a decade longer by caring for yourself, you will get more work completed than if you never clock off for proper meals, exercise, balanced lifestyle or sleep.

LOL, spoken by one who had a stroke at 32 because I thought I could live on 5 hours sleep a night, work late at night then hike up a mountain to look at the view, with a 7 year old child on my back.  Believe me; I know about excessive, creative, enthusiastic, self destructive behaviour.  Please LOVE YOURSELF MORE than your creations, and hold it in check with pre planning. J.