I've Been Doing This 3 Years?

This Zappa is one I'm going to send to Vinyl Killers this year. It'll be my 3rd year participating in the show. It feels like so long ago that I started marketing and selling my Vinyl Art. It's gone by so fast.

It's interesting to look back at something you've done for quite awhile, day in, day out, and see how things have changed, progressed. When I started out, I had vague goals, vague ideas of what I wanted to happen. Beginning with the end in mind, as Covey says, but broadly. My main goal was exposure. And it's happening! Kinda cool.

Sure, day to day sometimes it seems like nothing is happening in a broader scale. But looking at a chart of RSS subscribers that looks like the best stock chart ever is encouraging. My goal is for that to continue, for more people to hook into my blog and hopefully read a good number of posts. I know there're a lot. I'll be highlighting my favorites.

Let me know which you've dug!

Peace.

Unsticking Myself In Time

This was my desk this morning. This has been my desk, in general, my whole life. My floor of my room in my parents' house was a maze of stacks, the beautiful Chinese silk rug completely covered except for a narrow path to my stereo. Mentally, I'm a hoarder. It's fear-based. I have in another room ALL of my school work from pre-school through college organized in folders by grade and class in banker boxes.

I fear losing my past.

It's difficult to say, to write. My fingers tremble a bit at the realization.

It's never been so much that I'm worried about getting done what I need to get done. That takes care of itself, honestly. I get to it. It's that I hold on to the physicality of the chronology of my Life. I attach so much meaning to objects as placeholders in time.

It's time to change that. I'm currently working on some life lessons provided to me by my dad. The task I picked to focus on today relates to the well known lesson that if your desk is cluttered, so are you. So to set a new behavior, I needed to clean my desk. But not just clean it, meaning opening the drawers and sliding all the stacks into them. I needed to organize it, setting up new habits that don't rely on chronological order.

I needed to organize myself. So I did.

All has been filed appropriately and notes of info and to-do's have been consolidated in the notebook on the scanner to the left. And I even took previously hid stacks out of drawers and organized them too.

It's really just a matter of committing to the change, writing it down, telling somebody else about it. It works!

Peace.

No More Mr. Nice Guy

Warped.

I mean the record.

Peace.

Baby Barter

Thank you John Lennon! His beautiful drawings for his son, Sean, are the inspiration for our entire nursery, which I finished painting yesterday. My wife, the planner, found the Carter's collection a few years ago and knew she wanted it for our nursery, when we would make one. We stored away crib sheets, bibs, a playard, a bouncer, blankets, sleepers... you name it. It was really smart actually, because not only do we now have a super cute nursery, but we have a bunch of the stuff we need.

But not all. Not by a long shot.

So that's why we decided to do a sort of a barter deal. We've registered at Babies "R" Us. Here is the registry. What I'm offering is a framed piece of your choice, custom painted and shipped, if you buy $150 worth of items from the registry. Pieces are usually $175 plus shipping.

Besides the discount, you'll get to tell people you helped out the artist's family by providing really helpful and adorable things for their new baby, Abbey Grace. How cool is that? Get an awesome personal piece of art for yourself or as a gift for the holidays and make a very real difference in our lives.

Please share this offer with whomever you think would be interested, as well.

Thank you so much!

Peace.

P.S. My wife had 2 great ideas. 1st, if you do buy items from the registry for us, please forward your confirmation email to me so we can remember what people bought when we send thank you cards. 2nd, though not as fun, you could also do gift cards the same way.

What's The Sense?

How do you think? Is it in words? Images? Sounds? Smells or tastes? Feelings?

I've got words, images and sounds up in my brain. But words usually trump. It's sometimes annoying, no? I know I just want to turn off the stream of conversation my brain seems to have with itself. It gets in the way of what I want to do. That's why I paint. With music on.

Ahhhhh.

It really does sort of turn into meditation. I don't think in words about each dab of the brush. I don't think in words about each moment of music. It's very peaceful. I think that means, while words are dear to me, my passion lies with music and art.

Funny how what I ended up doing every day combines both. Makes me feel really lucky I sometimes get paid to do it. Those moments fly by, leaving me wishing for more daylight.

Do you do what makes time fly for you? If you do, it's cool isn't it? If you don't, why not? What's the sense?

Peace.