The Artist’s Life: June 1-7

The Artist’s Life is a weekly post that details my activities trying to squash as much quilting time into my life as possible whilst being a wife, mother, web professional and personal feeding and petting slave and couch to two cats, but still retaining at least a semblance of sanity . These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory and productivity tracking than the reader’s entertainment.

Thursday: Morning on the computer, the usual email, blog reading, checking in on 9rules, etc. thing. Spent the afternoon having a late lunch and meeting with a potential client/creative contact doing some networking. Pleasant afternoon, but I’m not sure where it goes from here. I’d like to pick up a couple more web projects, but this one is more along the lines of a collaboration and/or barter/trade than getting paid straight out. Which is not a bad thing, since this person is a creative individual like myself, and maybe we can work on some things together and contribute to each other’s creative energy levels. Since he prefers to communicate sometimes by IM, expecially when trading ideas back and forth and working on collaborative projects, I broke out of my shell and figured out how to do the MSN Messenger thing after dinner. I’ve never had a reason to worry about it before now, and I’m not sure chatting is my thing, but I’ll bite. I’m a total noob, which I guess is kind of weird considering my normal level of techy-ness.

I’ve been thinking of posting a bit of web development type stuff to the blog, but I can’t see how to integrate it just yet. It’s not exactly like it relates to quilting at all, but it is part of what I do, sometimes a very large part. I’m tossing around ideas for posts geared toward quilters who blog, and maybe providing some tips and such in that vein.

Off to bed to stay up too late reading, because that’s what I do.
DPR (Daily Productivity Rating): 5

Friday: did the usual coffee & Internet wakeup. The wake up was a bit earlier than usual (but not earlier than I should be getting up, it must be said). ITMan’s office handi rang and woke me up before he could even get out the door, and then he of the loud and expressive voice paced around upstairs in his man shoes and kept me awake until I gave up and got out of bed. I growled at him about it on my way to the coffee. I swear, you can hear everything in this house…and he should know that by now…

After reading email and spending some more time dealing with the mailserver issues with the webhost (many support tickets and emails back and forth over the last two weeks, since the shared mail server keeps getting blacklisted due to spammers), I spent most of the day preparing Inchies for embellishment. And thinking. Thinking about where the heck my time goes when I feel like I get nothing done all day (or even all week). In an effort to figure it out, I thought I’d try a bit of journaling, so that at least I will look back at my day and perhaps see where the constructive and unconstructive parts are, really. So this is it. My journaling attempt to figure out where the heck my time goes. And it starts on Thursday because I’ve just decided to do this on Friday, and Thursday is the last day I can remember in detail. Well, except for the day earlier in the week when I was just in a foul mood about pretty much everything, and I don’t remember all the details anyway. *sigh*

I’m calling this journaling effort “The Artist’s Life” because sometimes, in the midst of being a wife, mother and programming websites on the side for myself and others, I forget momentarily that I’d really like to make this professional artist/quilter thing work, somehow. Maybe this will help me remember it? Or maybe it will just suck up more time and not tell me a damn thing. Hopefully, at the very least, maybe it will either help me focus, or show me what types of things are stealing my focus. I’m not quite sure yet if these posts will be public or not, or included in the main feed or not. Probably not in the feed, since this is not my usual content, and I’m not sure it needs to be “out there.”

Took the girls to the pool in the afternoon, and spent more time preparing Inchies (and thinking) while they were gone. Did the dinner thing for the family, and then I’ve spent the rest of the evening on more of the same email garbage that I worked on this morning. I’ve had emails from my websites forwarded to gmail for years, because the gmail spam filters are so much better than the SpamAssassin filter that comes standard preinstalled with the website hosting.

It seems though, that perhaps automatically forwarding mails that come into the site on to gmail is contributing to the shared mailserver being considered a spammers haven and being blacklisted, since the spam that doesn’t get caught by SpamAssassin then looks like it’s actually generated by the mailserver instead of just forwarded. Seems like a bit of a catch 22 situation here, but there it is. I took all the forwarders down, and now I’ll have to slog through the 2,500-3,000 spam mails I get a month from this website alone, instead of letting gmail handle it. That kind of crap is not the fun part of web development, btw.
DPR (Daily Productivity Rating): 6

Saturday: Highly constructive day, probably because everyone in the house left me alone. I embellished 20 Inchies, even though I felt like I was all thumbs the entire time. I don’t have all the right colors of embellishments for the current batch of Inchies that I’m working on so the design process is hindered quite a bit, but beside that I just felt like I was fumbling around and things weren’t going as smoothly as usual. I made myself continue on anyway, keeping my hands busy while I did some brainstorming about how to consolidate/reorganize a couple of websites and thought about a new design. When I finally looked at the next four Inchies in the batch and drew a complete embellishment inspiration blank, I gave up and mounted more lights in the studio. Didn’t even have to cook dinner, as ITMan and the kids took themselves off to the post for dinner before the Girl Scout ceremony thing they had to go to.

I even felt like I could leave the studio and head off to bed at a semi decent hour. I think sometimes I don’t feel like I get enough done in a day (okay, most days are like that) so then I sit up here long after I should be thinking about going to bed, trying to eke that last little bit of productiveness out of the day. Most of the time that’s doomed to failure if the day’s been that unproductive, and I should just throw in the towel and hit the sheets. To be fair though, there are times when that last desperate bid for productivity yields fruit, and I then stay up even later tinkering around on the computer programming or something. Days like today though, they’re golden: getting up and doing exactly what I wanted when I wanted to do it, and not worrying about what anyone else is doing. Definitely high on my list of desirables.
DPR (Daily Productivity Rating): 10

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