When in doubt, make stuff!

So today is another day, and aside from the day-after feeling from digging snow in all the spare time of yesterday, not to mention the various alarms and excursions the previous night, I'm feeling pretty good. Especially since I got back into the studio yesterday, on top of everything else, because that's as good as a get-well clinic for me.

And made a couple of transformations. One used the backs and lovely brass fittings from another book, which I painted freely and very happily, with gold and silver and my trusty sponge brush, then cut and punched out pages to fit in, and thereby made a nice new artist book, which will be in the mail quite soon.



Some of the pages are high quality rough watercolor paper, some are thinner paper for writing or maybe drawing.

The other is just a paint job. During the massive Paper Clearout and File Fixing up, still ongoing, I found this little fully loaded, empty notebook, which was a boring old blue. Now it's gold and silver with blue showing through, much more cheerful.




If it doesn't move, paint it. And this madeover notebook got a severely useful function in its new life: my grocery lists!

Big plan: I will date the lists I make so that I can tell how long stuff lasts around here, currently a bit of a mystery, largely because most of my shopping expeditions are mad rushes to the local Asian store or even madder rushes to the further away supermarket, for just a few items, all I have time for, given that HP can't be alone for more than a very short while. This tends to militate (or as a pretentious but not very well read friend used to say, mitigate) against organization. Flylady would be horrified.

Years ago, when we first combined our households, -- that's another discovery I made, that it was seven years ago in June, time flies when you're running to keep up with what life doles out -- anyway, starting back then,I made notes for a few months on what housecleaning I did by date, in order to find out how often I actually did this rotten stuff, and was happy to find that it wasn't as often as it seemed. So maybe food items last longer than I realize too. We'll see.

This is my Inner Bookkeeper at work. My Total Artist makes allowance for my IB now and then.