Junebug on a String

Hey, y’all. :)

I had grand plans of showing you all the insane stuff from this weekend, but I’m flippin’ exhausted.  It’s a good exhausted.  An exhausted where you flop back on the couch and exhale and think to yourself now THAT just TOTALLY ROCKED and I need a nap.

So instead, I’m going to let you talk back to me today.  I’m getting ready to gear up for this week’s 10kH stuff, and I’d love your feedback while I’m mapping out where to go from here.

Just come on over here and tell me a little bit aboutchoo.

As a little incentive, if you do it, I’ll throw your name in the hat for a little giftie at the end of the month.

:)

p.s.  There are three or four files in the monster kit that appear to be giving PCs fits.  I’m on it.  Hold tight, non-Macfolks, and I should have it fixed and re-uploaded by the end of tomorrow.  I’ll send y’all an email when it’s no longer being a pain.   (And people wonder why I say technology makes my eyes bleed…!)

After taking a look at how some of the monsters scaled in 300 dpi, I narrowed them down to these seven (and one peeking head) to go along with the MONSTERS kit.  (The first one, at least.)  Not all of this is shown — I could only fit this much before things started to overlap way too much. :)  In the actual kit:

• 7 monster “stickers”, ready for printing or digital stuff
• one “Zippy Page” in .psd format so all you have to do is stick in a pic or quote
• two frames
• two journalling cards
• one zombie-like monster overlay (including gravestone)
• two banners
• two penant-style banners (blue and green)
• a ton of flowers, large and tiny, and a cluster to use, too.
• hand-drawn buttons in three colors
• three quotes and IT’S ALIVE word art (lisa simpson, tori amos, and mary shelley.  No, seriously.)
• 16 coordinated papers, most of which are semi-solids for clean-looking layouts with just a little spunk.

It’s freakin’ HUGE, y’all.  81MB of 300 dpi ready-for-printing files, perfect for art journals, handmade cards and mixed-media, and, yes, even scrapbooking layouts.  Go figure.  :D

There will also be some special add-ons in the coming days for anyone who buys a kit — several more monsters, and some card templates are in the works, with a link sent directly to your email.  Can’t beat that with a stick.

And the whopping total price tag on this puppy?  Five bucks.  Because I’m like that, yo.  (And I’m also highly caffeinated right now, which explains my use of the word “yo” in a sentence.)

ETA NOTE: I *think* I got the international payment thing for digital goods sorted with paypal. We still don’t take non-US orders for physical stuff, but the digital stuff SHOULD be going through now. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled blog entry.

Which segues me right into the rant I had cooking for a few days now about a little trend I’m noticing among certain peeps.  (Yes, “peeps” and “yo”.  In the same post.  Someone should cut off the caffeine drip.)

This weekend is (i)NSD.  For those not in the know, that’s (inter)National Scrapbooking Day.  A whole lot of places online and off are having huge events (called crops, for the unseasoned), and sales and such.  From what I’ve read on various message boards, it seems like about half the scrapbookers online save up all year and blow it all this weekend.  It’s like black friday and worldwide knit-in-public day all wrapped into one.

And while writing that last paragraph,  I totally just felt about half my reading audience cringe.  Which is where the rantybit comes in.

I’ve noticed, in the non-scrapbooker world, this kind of disdain for the activity, and for those who do it.  It’s weird, actually, considering most of those folks are knitters or crocheters, which, up until recently, was considered kind of an archaic, anachronistic pursuit in and of itself.  I’ve seen mentions of “crapbooking” and upturned noses, and honestly, a kind of snobbery that’s really, disproportionately vehement.

I’m here in the digital design world by way of mixed-media art.  I was a working artist for about half my adult life before I Found Yarn in the way some people find Jesus, converting to wool worship full-time for a while there.  I still keep an art journal pretty regularly, even though I’m not as in to the whole mixed-media community thing as I was before.  I wrote books about art journaling, in fact, and altered books (before the mainstream got ahold of them and turned them into PUT THIS PAPER HERE, PUT THAT RUBBER STAMP THERE, YOU’RE DONE.).  I have the street cred and the CV.

Which is why I feel compelled to mention that what we used to consider “scrapbooking”, with the nice little printed papers and stickers of bunnies and decorative-edged scissors…?  Not so much anymore.  There are some incredible artists out there doing things with layout that most magazines couldn’t do, with more skill than most of the quote-unquote “artists” I know.  But because that art has a picture in it, and some kind of caption, it’s being lumped together with bunny stickers and deemed as somehow less-than “real art”.

Puh-leeze.

IMHO, if someone’s doing something creative, then they’re already light-years ahead of all the people who just sit around and talk about what they’ll do someday.  And not all of it may be my style, per se, but then again, I don’t walk into an art gallery expecting to love all the hellishly-expensive paintings, either.  So what makes a scrapbook different from an artist’s journal or sketchbook?  Or a series of mixed-media collages, for that matter?  The fact that there may be some stuff on the page made by a big company that labels itself for scrapbookers?  Or a picture?

Even back when I was making Real (Gasp) Art (Pretentious Pose Here), there were times I used both of those.  Seriously.  Sure, the *intent* was different, but that doesn’t mean my intent was any more or less than anybody who makes something.  Just like nobody’s allowed to tell me that handknit socks are stupid when you can buy them for a buck at Wal-Mart, you can’t tell me that just because someone’s choosing to record their own stories with words and pictures is stupid, either.

So lay off the “crapbooking” references.  Pry open your mind a little.  Start an art journal or make some mixed-media art, and stop feeling guilty if you use a piece of pre-printed paper.  It’s all creativity, and it’s all good.

The other thing I was going to talk to y’all about today is the concept of singletasking. And I’ll make it brief, since I’ve already blabbed your ear off.

I don’t remember where I heard about it.  I may not have heard about it.  I may have just unvented it one day. (Elizabeth Zimmerman reference.)  I don’t remember. Disclaimer made.

All I know is that people today are overworked.  We’re doing too much at once, and as a result, we aren’t focusing nearly as much as we could if we weren’t juggling fifteen spinning plates at the same time.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a lot on my plate (which isn’t on fire, nor is it spinning, but it’s a good metaphor.).  I do a lot of varied things, including all this 10kH stuff.  And if I’m not really vigilant about doing one thing at a time, there are fiftysixbillion other things that will rear their sparkly heads and start dancing for my attention.  While screaming.  Loudly.  It feels almost like an artificial, externally-created DOS attack, DIRECTLY IN MY BRAIN.

Last Fall, just before my life exploded in a shower of sparkly flames, I’d put into place a method of singletasking.  Every day, I had ONE FOCUS.  One.  Singular.  Period.  Today, I work on X Project, and tomorrow, I work on Project Y.  I made out a schedule, and each day was ONE THING.

Now, that’s not to say there weren’t fifty-six-billion tasks on those days.  But there was only one FOCUS for the day.

And I can tell you now, those three weeks were the most productive weeks of ALL of 2009 for me, which is saying something, because I have a relatively high output level on a regular schedule.  This one-thing-at-a-time deal, though?  Probably tripled what got done in any one comparable amount of time.  Better, I got it all done during a typical 8-hour work day, which is a HUGE CHANGE from the get-up-work-go-to-sleep model I’m prone to.  (And then everything exploded.  Which got me out of the habit.  And for some reason, I didn’t think of it again for a while, because my brain was all bubbly and partially-scorched, and smelled a little like someone burned popcorn in the microwave again.)

Being here now, doing this Ten Thousand Hours thing, with TWO foci….well, it’s reminded me of how singletasking worked for me.  And I’m thinking I’m going to make a pretty significant change in how I’m doing my 10kH.  I’ll still be doing hours every day, and still be doing both projects.  (And the day job, and L&V, and and and and….)  But I’m going to try a few weeks of singletasking again.  Bring it all down to one thing a day, but learn as much as I possibly can on that day, about that focus.  I already have a system in place and the schedule pencilled in.

It may work like a dream, it may incite a rebellion in my brain the likes of which we’ve never seen.  Either way, I’ll keep y’all updated, and expound a little on the actual mechanics of it, in later days.

For now, though, my singletask is to get in the shower and get prettified to go out.  Greensboro has this AMAZING week the first week of May, where there are constant art events for TEN WHOLE DAYS (*swoon*), and tonight kicks it off with a free Brazillian music and dance thing at the Cultural Center, all the First Friday events, a Handmade Market, and then an old-fashioned Artist’s Salon at Elsewhere (possibly the coolest art collective EVER)….and I’m so going OUT.

Might even get a few pictures for the scrapbooks.

;)

After two days in a row “off” from doing much of anything on the 10kH (well, kind of.  I’ll get to that.), I was looking forward to diving back in with a vengeance.  And right on cue, my friend Brianna of The Yarn Side contacted me about doing a little extra for her yarn club, Yarnography.  This time around, the photo inspiration is called Tea Time, and, well…you can see up there what happened.  One minute, I was trying to schedule out some time today to wash the (profoundly stinky) dog, and the next, I was up to my ears in tea blends and baked good smells.

Can’t say as I mind.  They came out awesome.  Two vials of perfume in a matchbook-style fold-out case for shipping.  Start-to-finish, indeed.

total today: 5:12:25 thusfar on scent.

Not ignoring the digital stuff (since I was…uh…so close to levelling up on that Level Me Up! app that I HAD TO.  I’m easily manipulated by the shiny, apparently.), here’s part of the rest of the Monsters Kit, that I’m hoping to have done by this weekend, if all goes well:

There are, thusfar, four frames (each in a few of the colors), a ton of little button and lower elements of varying colors and sizes and shapes, thirteen monster “stickers”, the garden border, a border overlay with monster arms, and thirteen papers.  With more on the way.  It’s gonna be a big’un.

Speaking of monsters, Teri…well, okay, her husband Mick…figured out the embroidery software we got, so the monsters?  Totally going to be on everything from t-shirts to knitting bags to scarves to baby stuff in the near future.  Seriously.  It takes a bit of futzing to get them to look the same-ish, but it’s insanely cute.   My teeth hurt when I look at ‘em.  In a good, non-vicodin-taking kind of way.

And someone is working up some knitting stuff, too.  Can. Not. Wait.

Total time on digi today: 1:52:44, and I’m planning more before I retire for the evening.  This weekend is insanely busy (with all fun stuff, but still, full), so I need to do stuff now if it’s gonna get done. :)

So a couple days ago (I think…days are kind of running together at this point), I started thinking about this Ten Thousand Hours Rule in Gladwell’s book.  (Not that I don’t think about it a lot.  Just sayin’.)  I was trying to explain to someone the difference between repetition and deliberate, dedicated practice, and the words just weren’t coming.

So I turned to the expert(s), and while I didn’t find much in Outliers, I did find the doctor that did the research/studied the folks about whom Gladwell wrote the book.  Turns out there’s a very large, very academic, very bricklike compendium of that research (No, really.  Like, NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY PAGES of research findings) that Dr. Ericsson published, and in one of those link-from-a-link-from-a-link actions that the net’s famous for, I found a copy of one of his articles published in the Harvard Review that was just freakin’ fascinating.

As I’d sort-of started to think, after two weeks of delving into these two things I really want to do, there really is a difference between doing something for time and doing something for mastery. Like Ericsson put it, just because you live in a cave, it doesn’t make you an expert geologist.

I do think that doing things this way, the way I’ve been doing them, is valuable.  I’m learning something every day.  Maybe not at an accelerated rate yet, but, if nothing else, I’m learning how much there is to learn.  It’s changing the way I’m looking at this project, and the whole process of it, and I’m really chuffed about where it’s heading.

I’m also writing it all up as I go, so I can eventually (like, soonish) share it with y’all, since I think it really applies to any kind of desire for getting better at something, even if it’s not a “formal” type program.  More on that as it gets done.

And best, I called Dr. Ericsson today.  Left a message on what (I’m hoping) was his voice mail that probably made me sound like a crazywoman, actually.  (Uh, hi, Dr. Ericsson.  My name’s Elli Metz and I’m doing this project based indirectly on your research, and I was wondering if, uh, you might have time to talk with me sometime about it?   I promise I’m not REALLY a stalker, no matter what I might have said on facebook.  And you have much better hair than Malcolm Gladwell….)

The FBI is so going to call me.  I can feel it.

Tomorrow, I absolutely have to get to Rant II, the sequel.  (Which isn’t really a rant.)  And singletasking, which people keep asking me about.  (It’s a result of this new information from Dr. Betterhair’s research.  But I’ll get to that tomorrow.)

Hope you’re all having a great week.

OH OH OH….p.s.  (edited to add, a few minutes later, because I forgot)  iPhone Geek update.  mi_Xpert, the app I was going to use for tracking from here on out?  Totally not happening.  It does not keep the stopwatch running when you exit the app, and since I’m prone to getting phone calls all day long, I was losing time by the bucketload.  (Luckily, I still had Daily Tracker’s timer running, too, just in case.  I may be adventurous with my technological tryings, but I’m not stupid.)  On the plus side, the timer on Level Me Up! will also keep running in the background, but it doesn’t give you a countdown from 10k, which is a bummer.  And the 10000 app still only runs ONE timer, ever, which is a pain in my dual-goal patootie.

Needless to say, the search is still on at this point.

(Though now, I am a Level 12 Scent Goddess.   Pardon me whilst I go get my pocket protector and ten-sided dice.)

You probably remember, if you’ve been reading all this from the beginning, that this was the app I picked to keep track of the time I’m spending on each of the projects.  I tried a few web apps, but didn’t like having to stop what I was doing and walk aaaaalll the way to the other side of the room to change tasks.  (Yes, I’m aware it’s the height of Lazy.  Lemmealone.)  And the interfaces were a little clunky.  And I was having trouble finding a web app that would keep both running totals *and* countdown times, blahblahblah.

Daily Tracker was my solution to that, at the time.  As you can see up there, it has a TON of features on it, including a bunch of different ways to track things, both related to and unrelated to the project.  Best part: you can have multiple timers running simultaneously, and exit the app.  It shows a little badge button with the number of active timers, while you go off and check email or whatever.  Nice.

Downside is that a running total across days was hard to get, unless I didn’t let it advance days.  It kept a DAILY running total, which was nice, but not an OVERALL one.  It was just kinda clunky, trying to figure out a workaround to make it work for my project, in specific.  (I *have*, though, been using it for other things, and I can tell you this — if you need to track something daily, this is the way to go.  And the programmers are very patient with tons of newbie questions, in my experience.)

Today, though, while I was doing something completely unrelated, I found this:

It’s called mi_Xpert and get this — it’s a TEN THOUSAND HOURS-SPECIFIC COUNTDOWN TIMER.

Did I say that loud enough?  Seriously.  10kH ready.  Also based on Gladwell’s book.  You can do multiple goals/end results/expertise areas, and you can add back time by clicking that little + sign up in the corner.  And it slowly ticks off the hours, rotating that little odometer in the middle there, so you can watch the numbers get bigger.  (I’m easily amused.  Sue me.)  Downside is that it does NOT allow you to run it in the background, which means that if you get a call, you’d better know where you were so you can add your hours/times as a backlogged time, or you lose it.  And your battery life better be full, or the phone/touch better be plugged in.  And you can only add back time to the minute, which, really, isn’t that bad of a drawback.  I just like being overly precise.

Under the “Details” button, you can see your progress percentage and total logged time, and how much you still have to go.  (I was all proud of how many hours I’d had in just over a week, only to find that I have 99.67% of the 10kH left to go.  Holy cow.)  You can also apparently set alarms, but for what, I’m not sure.  Maybe to remind you to eat and sleep?  (Says the girl still up and geeking over things at two a.m…..)

I like that you can add unlimited goals to this one, but it seems like that might be a little…unwise.  I can see their point — they say in the about info ,”(…) track teh time you spend working toward each (goal) — from lifelong aspirations to mundane tasks.  What will emerge is a big picture of personal progress, quantifying your dedication toward a variety of commitments.”

Admirable, but for the course of my own project, I don’t really care how many hours I spend doing dishes, because it’s not something I necessarily want mastery of.  I mean, really…other than those two british ladies from “How Clean Is Your House?”, who wants to be an expert on doing dishes?

This one’s easy to use, and I love the tracking.  But then I found this:

ANOTHER app, specifically devoted to keeping track of ten thousand hours.  It’s called, original as it is, “10000″.

No, really.  It is.  (That’s just like giving up, programmers!)

This one is slick.  Slick looking, and the functionality is kinda nifty.  It does run in the background in the one unscientific test I did, and I love that it date/timestamps every session.  (Something I liked about Daily Tracker.)  You can add in your backlogged hours, and as you go along, the little stars light up for you.  (Hey, it’s cute, and I’m a girl.)

It seems easier to use, until you find that this app?  Only tracks ONE THING.  Which, honestly, is probably how it SHOULD be.  Diverting your attention between two projects is a tough dance, and probably requires the record-keeping just to keep them straight.   For those running just one 10kH project, though, this would be like the PERFECT simple app.  Tells you elapsed time and time remaining, and really, that’s all you need.  Nice there’s something that will do it for you, from a programmer who actually understands WHY you’re keeping track. :)

Other downside — you can only have one past record.  So if you mess up and forget to start the timer (as I am wont to do), you have to delete the existing past-time record and add in both the OLD number of hours and the new number you forgot to timer.  Which means you’re back to math.

Both of those previous apps are $.99 on the appstore, versus $9.99 for Daily Tracker.  I wish I’d found them first.

HOWEVER…  (and you knew this was coming, right?)…there’s MORE.

I stumbled on, through a series of links that I can’t even tell you now how I found, this little puppy:

OMG OMG OMG.  I almost have no words, due to the GLEEing coming out of my head right now.

Level Me Up! is another $.99 app that uses the 10kH Rule for gaining skill proficiency and mastery.  Much like the other two, it keeps track of your time, but it does it in a unique, fun way.  Using a kind of RPG-like levelling system, it lets you set particular goal activities, and as you add time to each goal, it “levels you up” when you hit arbitrary marks.  For the first 1k hours, you level up one level for every 10 hours spent; for the so-called “Epic Levels” of 1k – 10K, you level up every 90 hours.  Each level up gives you a new title and the progress bar re-sets, like an XP bar in a game.

Even cooler, it interacts with your Facebook account and will post your level ups, if you’re so inclined.  It’s not quite like blogging your progress, but it works in a pinch, and it makes me squee.  Loudly.

The downside is major, though — it only counts one-hour increments, especially for backlogged time, so if you have more than one but less than two hours, it’ll only register one hour, even if it’s one hour and fifty-nine-point-five minutes.  You can get around it by starting the timer when you’re not actively working on your goal, and stopping it at the overage number of minutes, but it feels a little unnecessary, when giving us the option for less than a full-hour increment would be much easier, and probably wouldn’t take that much time from the programmers.

Upside — it allows for users, so if you’re the only one in your household with an iPhone/Touch, but you AND your partner are both doing the project, you can keep separate profiles.  It DOES run in the background, so you can keep time and use your phone, if you need to.

Also, the help files/about files have some great information on both determining your task goals and defining your skills, which most people seem to ask the most questions regarding.  There’s some good advice here.

It does not have a running countdown from 10,000, too, which was a little odd.  The only thing it shows you on those bars is how far you have to go before hitting the next level.  It means that if you want a running total, you’ll need to do the dreaded time-math manually.

But honestly?  Even if I won’t use this for my main tracker (I’m going with the mi_Xpert, for a lot of reasons mentioned above), I will TOTALLY be adding my time to this, since the levelling up is just so flippin’ cute.  It also makes these first hours feel like a race or a competition of some sort, which is motivating due to the small, new level rewards.  (What can I say?  I’m a geek and I’m easy.)

***

So after all this geeking out today, I logged precisely bupkiss for hours of my own.  A few minutes here and there, but nothing major.  Some friends were in town and I really needed the break, and after a day of yarn and cheesecake and bloated beaverwalruses with Mary Ann and Cindy (both of whom I wanted to throw in the trunk and bring home and keep forever and ever), I’m feeling completely revved up and ready for the next bout of hour-ing.

Tomorrow, however, is a planned hooky day.  Wednesdays are reserved for Lime & Violet Live, and I’ve got some non-project-related knitting that needs to get done, or at least progress beyond the first repeat, or it won’t be done in time for a certain cohost’s wedding…and it *needs* to be done.  That, and the day job has a few things for me to do.  And there are two hundred waiting emails in the box.  An Admin Day(tm) is in order.

But I’m still in app/tool SqueeMode.  Tracking is SO much easier to do with an application that was *made* for this very process…it’s just squeeworthy.

Does this mean I’m a total geek?

Yeah, yeah.  I know.

Long couple of days, folkses.  I thought I was going to post this last night, in fact, but even after taking a relatively long (for me) nap in the afternoon, I was asleep in the chair by 9:30, and curled up in bed by 10, which is pretty early for me.  (I’m blaming pollen.  The little sporethings are whooping my butt.)

Aside from the monsters, which have now all been redrawn in a higher DPI (the ones I showed you the other day were just for little sketches and were at web resolution, which doesn’t print all that well.  Not so good for digital designs that will eventually need to be printed somehow.), I ended up making all this stuff up there.  Apparently, my monsters live in a garden.  With buttons.  I’m okay with that.  :)

I *will* say that I’m really glad to be moving back in the direction of just hand-drawing stuff this week.  I like that stuff better, to be honest.  It’s much more work than, say, scanning in a pair of jeans for texture or vintage book text to cut into shapes, but it just feels more uniquely *mine* when I do it all this way.

Digital design totals for  Sunday and Monday:  4:14:31.

Scent has been CRAZY.  I’m at building time, meaning every spare second is spent with the wacom and the notebooks, sketching out not only WHERE things are, but WHAT they are — the building faces, who owns them, what goes on there.  I’m at the phase where I’m establishing setting in a very real and meaningful way, so that there’s a stage on which the characters and events can play.  Most of it’s been in my head for a very long time now (I can tell you where the genesis of the idea began — December 6th, 2008, hotel room in NC before I lived here, talking with a friend.  I can even tell you what the conversation was, and what sparked the idea, and show you, on paper, how it grew over a matter of hours.  Within a few weeks, I had the domain and just had to wait for some other things to get done before diving in.), which is why it’s INCREDIBLY EXCITING to watch it taking shape.

It’s not just about scent, Oak River.  It’s about story.  And while every place and person and event will *have* a scent, there are a ton of other things going on here, too.  Collaborative story-writing, yarn and knitting patterns, Lydia Foote and her awesome teas (*snort*), cookbooks and books of collected stories, and an apothecary full of bath stuff by Teri.  All I’m producing is the town, the stories, and the scents — but collaboratively, this thing is much huge-r than the sum of its parts, and it’s gonna be awesome.

I wasn’t kidding when I called it a scratch-and-sniff online interactive graphic novel.  Just sayin’.

Most of the past two days has been drawing and filling in holes on the downtown walking tour, but it’s added up to a LOT of time.  I mean A Lot.  Like, yesterday and the day before: 11:48:52′s worth of time.  And that’s WITH the other digital stuff going on.  If I wasn’t being smacked with the pollenhammer, there would probably have been more. :)

Speaking of ORT — huge thanks to Iko for figuring out (at a glance…she’s amazing with teh code of doom) what was wrong with the main index.  It should be displaying for everyone now, not just the firefoxers.

The Public Library’s still in progress, but it was too cute not to show.  (And it’s based on the public library of the town I grew up in, which was an old Carnegie Library from the early 1900s.  I was so sad when they built the new one far away from my house, but they turned this building into the arts center for a number of years, so it was okay in the end.  Last time I was home, it was an architectural firm, I believe, now.  *sigh* Progress…)

(Insert clunky subject-change HERE, because I haven’t had enough coffee for segues)

It’s been a little while since I got all meta on y’all.  And I want to get just a little bit meta for a second about the 10kH Project.

In March, I had THE PLAGUE.

Okay, fine, it was a respiratory infection.  But it might as well have been THE PLAGUE from as much as I was whining about it.  (I’m a reeeeally good whiner when I’m sick.  I can annoy a normal person at twenty paces.)  To be fair, it really was a sucky bout of PLAGUE.  The doctor tried to tell me that it was bronchitis, and that bronchitis was “going around”, and just to rest and drink lots of fluids, even when I tried to explain that no, I was pretty sure this was a respiratory infection.  (As a kid, I’d get these things.  Allergies would set them off, and I’d get LRIs a couple times a year.  It was to the point where, when I went to college, I could call my hometown doctor and tell him it was happening again and he’d call in a prescription over the phone.  I get them ALL THE TIME.  I KNOW what they ARE.)  Doctor here, not being familiar with my body’s penchant for getting all lung-chunky, didn’t listen to me.  (And, ironically enough, when I finally called my hometown doctor for antibiotics, it cleared up in two days.  GO FIGURE.  Grr.  I really wish doctors would *listen to their patients*.  Rant for another day.)

ANYWAY…

The reason I mention it is because for most of the month of March, I couldn’t breathe.  I spent large portions of my day laying in a chair (because laying down flat would make me cough up my toes), unable to do anything more than read and occasionally write fever-addled notes.  DayQuil was my friend AND my nemesis, because it meant I could breathe, but then, I was AWAKE (deserving of the all-caps) and still had no air capacity to DO much of anything.

To say that this sucked is an understatement.  For me, who is never still for very long anyway, to be unable to do much?  INSANE.   I was the very definition of Crazypants.

All I could do, literally, was read.  And read, I did.  I read blogs and ebooks, copious books on the kindle, every magazine in the house, and the entire Wizard of Oz series.  Even the crappy non-Baum volumes.  I had to do SOMETHING, and there’s only so many movies on Hulu that are worth spending time on.  :)

It was in mid-March when I read the article in Smashing Magazine about designing something every day.  The call to action.  I read all the blogs of the people participating,  including the ones that did it for a week or two and quit.  And I filed it away somewhere under “DO THIS SOMEDAY”, because I thought it was the world’s most awesome idea.  Sure, there are a ton of those do-something-every-day projects out there.  All that meant was that I could totally get on someone else’s bus and follow the rules they set down.  Which, to my fever-addled brain, sounded just fine.

So when I dug out Outliers again after Angie’s talk at ReneePearsonTV, it didn’t click at first that the Ten Thousand Hours postulate would be relevant to the Smashing call for design every day.  They seemed pretty separate — Gladwell just researched the work of other folks and reported back that the experts said it takes X number of hours to gain mastery/world-expert status.  And I thought that ten thousand hours was a WHOLE LOTTA TIME.  But maybe…

The two gelled in my head somehow.  Do something every day toward the predetermined time goal.  Advance your skills in a particular area through focused work and study, and maybe watch how the hours change as you go.  How your *skills* advance, as the hours start racking up.  I picked an arbitrary date (April 15th), and started talking to y’all about it.

But I want to make something clear here:  The 10kH is mine. This is MY PROJECT.  Nothing else like it exists, in this form, anywhere else.  The research is based on all kinds of sources (Gladwell and Smashing, among them), and the actual execution of the project is MINE.  Steps are not laid out in Outliers (it’s not that kind of book), Smashing never called for an hours component, and while other people have read the book and mentioned the ten thousand hours theory of mastery, nobody else is doing exactly what I’m doing.

I invited y’all into my living room, so to speak, to either watch the progress or to play along doing whatever it is that you want to be known for, because it’s more fun with friends.  Doesn’t matter what the “it” is.  IT is always more fun with friends.  And if we’re all having the same pain of keeping up, it’s comforting. :)   But that doesn’t really change that it’s my living room you’re in.

Over the past couple days, I’ve seen some folks claim the 10kH, either directly or indirectly.  I’ve seen people get the purpose of it wrong (it is NOT about doing things you don’t want to do, or motivating you to do all the sucky parts of your chosen field.  There *are* no sucky parts of your passion, and if you’re doing this for anything other than your passion, you won’t make ten thousand hours, I’ll guarantee it. You’d be bored before a hundred.), people say that this is “something going around the internet” (Um, no, it’s not.  It’s mine.), or take the credit for their “good idea” in starting the project.

Aside from the fact that it’s just bad ethics to claim someone else’s project/work/ideas as your own, it’s also undeniably rude.  Following the metaphor before, it’s like having someone invite you into their living room and peeing on their curtains.  Knock it off, you’re being a jerk.

So what I’m saying, essentially, is don’t pee on my curtains.  Coming up with this, and executing it, is a lot of work.  Work that I’m sharing freely with y’all.  Work that will probably end up being my livelihood at some point, and I’m not keen on people claiming that work, this idea, this unique combination of disparate existing research, as their own.

Capice?

And that said, I’m grateful to all the participants who are playing along and having fun with it and learning something along the way.  It’s tough to make time for this kind of thing in already-busy lives, and I hope y’all are getting something out of it, too.

I’d bake cupcakes for everybody if you were closer. :)

This…well, kind of…is what I did today.  It’s not ALL I did today.  There’s a legend and a bunch of not-quite-live webpages, all linked to drawings and descriptions and scents, some of which haven’t been made and others that aren’t quite ready for prime time.  But it’s made.  (This is the photocopy of the map, which is on the Oak River Library Community Information Board, the title of which is longer, spatially, than the board itself.  Go figure.)

I also planned out the week’s scents, named things, wrote stories until my fingers bled (only a little — hangnail.  Do not call 911.), and still managed to go buy fun fur yarn, which I’m still considering part of not only the project, but the scent part of the project.  (It’s the first of the knitting patterns for ORT.  That’s all I can say right now, until I have the finished thing done and posted.  But my portuguese friend in the back yard?  Yeah.  He’s there.)

It was, all in all, an 8 hour scent day.  I *like* those days.  Means this thing’s being built in double-time, and since my primary skill other than being recreationally annoyed appears to be writing stories set in the town I invented way back when (December sixth, 2008, to be specific — I took copious notes.), and it’s just awesome to be able to do what I love and have it turning out this unique and recognizable as a brand new genre.  Seriously.

No digital today, unless you count this:

It’s an inside joke, not an element, though I did get to play with all kinds of crazy image-manipulation stuff, so it was a learning experience.  Too bad it took roughly four minutes.  Doesn’t add much to the total hours. :)  (To be fair, almost ALL day Saturday was digital, so I’m not complaining.)

I’ve got a rant in me, by the way.  Two of them, actually, since I had one, and then another one presented itself.  (And in case you’re not good with suspense, one is on the bastard stepchildren of crafting, and one is on the importance of both attribution and being unique.  And now that I mention that, I should probably mention, if you couldn’t tell, that the foot part of the cult img above is all Monty Python.  I’d hate to be an inadvertent hypocrite out of fatigue.  It’s laaaate here.)

Sadly, I’m too tired to do either rant justice.  I’ll pick one tomorrow, when I get to show you the first glimpses of the Oak River Public Library,  and tell you how you can play along with the Summer Reading Program.  (It’s freakin’ awesome.)

In the meantime, bed’s calling.  Total time scent: 8:17:45.  Total time digital:  Uh.  04:31 + an indeterminate amount of time spent doing a blog design for a fellow 10kHer whom I’m hosting here on moderngypsy.com, but didn’t realize it would TOTALYL count as design time until it was waaaay too late..  I’m slacking, aren’t I?

(I’ll assume about an hour on that.  Yesterday’s digital ended up being 6:17:23, though, so it evens out.)

Do I sound as tired as I am?  babblebabblemonkeyponybabble.

The second of the Tiny Art Journals: Monster Edition is ready for download!  Just like last week’s TAJ, it uses one piece of cardstock and two pieces of regular ol’ paper, your printer, and some scissors to make a tiny little journal that’s easy to fill up and use.  This time, there’s a monster-arm closure, and over there in the sidebar —-> I added in a little step-by-step tutorial in case the construction of the thing has you flummoxed.

(I just like saying the word “flummoxed”.  It’s fun.)

You can download this once and print it out a billion times if you want, so for $3, it’s a steal.  I’m still fighting with Paypal for you non-US folks, and will keep you informed as to when I’ve finally hit them with a big enough stick. :)

As always, show me what you do with these!  I totally wanna see.

That said, folks have asked me about what to put in them.  My last one was, primarily, ideas about monsters.  Go figure.  I’m obsessed.  But here’s a little shot of the inside, so you can get an idea:

See what I mean?  FUN.  FUN FUN FUN.

Scentwise, I’ve read, cut out labels, and planned out the order of the coming weeks, but haven’t done all that much by way of actual blending.  Over the past two days, I’ve had just about four hours’ worth of reading/etc….but I’m not sure exactly, since I tend to forget the stopwatch when it’s just a book.  Digital hours for two days?  Yesterday, 2:21:28, and today so far, 2:11:55.  When I remembered the stopwatch.  I really need to quit forgetting if I’m going to count the hours.

Speaking of stopwatches — someone asked me about what program/widget I’m using up there in the upper right to keep track of my hours/running total.  It’s…uh…manual.  I add it all up every day or two and update the text widget by hand.  If anybody knows of one that does it for me, I am SO THERE, just give me a heads’ up in the comments. :)

Off to draw something OTHER than a monster for a bit.  Hope y’all are enjoying your Saturday!

Y’know how, sometimes, you start doing something, and then all of a sudden, you look up and it’s eight hours later and you have NO IDEA where the time went?

Yeah.  That’s my past two days.  I didn’t mean to take a blog break, but by the time I got back here to the little entry input dealie, I was already so worn out from the Big Giant Days Of WOWBUSY that I kinda just drooled on the mac for a minute or two before deciding (with good reason) that perhaps trying to write another coherent sentence may not be in the public’s best interest.  (I can totally hear the phone calls now.  Are you on drugs?  Do you need an intervention?  Or are you speaking in tongues for effect again?)

This isn’t to say I abandoned my 10kH project.  Not at all.  First thing in the morning, I dive into the scent thing until I get something done (even if that’s just reading, like on Wednesday), and after lunch, I take a few minutes to do something digital.  It may not be a whole LOT of time when I’m swamped, but it’s time, and it’ll add up in the end.

The past two days, scentwise, have been about understanding mistakes and identifying what went wrong.  I figure you learn more from the things that don’t work than you do from the things that do, and it’s certainly been the case with Sincerely Sun.  I ended up scrapping one of the base notes, subbing in something that I thought would mess up the whole concept, but which not only fixed it, it fixed it spectacularly. It’s actually MORE like what I wanted it to be than what it was before (not that ass-and-toast was part of my concept; just an unexpected side effect of two wildly incompatible chemical compositions in a couple essential oils.), and I love it.  A lot.

It’s like a field of sun-warmed sunflowers and scattered dandelions, with a golden amber baked-earth smell beneath it.  It’s seriously yummy.

I’ll get it added to the sidebar today at some point, and anybody who ordered all six of the other Sincerely scents already has one included in the package as a thank-you.  So there.

The second half of day 8 (and probably most of today) will be reading-related, or order-packing related, to be honest.  The pollen count in North Carolina today is OFF THE CHARTS, and I’m a little too snuffly to be making anything else at the moment.  (And I smell different, smell-as-verb, not smell-as-adjective, when I take allergy meds.  Downside to being human.)  But it’s all good.  The pictures just aren’t as fun. :)

ALSO!  The bag you see in the background of this shot is one of the AbiBags that Teri’s doing for donations to her baby dental fund.  All the details can be found on her blog, and I can vouch — these are awesome bags.  She’s going to keep doing them after the Wollmeise is given away, since the bill on this crazy oral surgery (on an 18 month old!) is INSANE.  Go buy one.  They’re totally worth it.

Then there’s these.  I have no idea how this evolved, to be honest.  One minute, I was making a quickie five-second sketch for a friend that was having a rotten birthday (Dani, who requested monster drawings as presents from the intarwebs.), and all day yesterday spiralled into making about FOUR BILLION of these little monster guys for people.  No, seriously.  Look.

I spent SIX HOURS yesterday drawing monsters.  (There are more than this.  Lots more.  Lots and lots and lots more.)  Some of them for people, some of them (like the hula-monster and the juggling monster, above) just because the idea hit me.  And it’s inspired the Adminnie to do some knitting, too, which I’ll explain when things get closer to done.  But holy *cow* MONSTERS.

So the theme for this week presented itself:  I still don’t have PseudoEarthDay put together as a zipfile, but I will, today, and it’ll be in the sidebar as a download, then, but this week….totally Monsters.  I’m doing up a Tiny Art Journal full of them here tonight as my 10kH hours, and coordinating papers and word art and such for cardmakings and artjournals and such through next Wednesday.  Should be up by Friday.

Whee for spontaneous inspiration, right? :)

Total hours for the three days:

scentstuff: 5:45:42
digitalstuff: 8:56:41

(so far)

Not a bad couple of days a’tall, y’all.

Man, today was busy.  Felt like Monday all day long, which was good, since it IS, in fact, a Monday.  And after yesterday’s hooky-break from the scent side of things, I decided to dive into a project that’s been marinating in the idea drawer of my brain for a good while.

Sincerely is a store here in North Carolina — Asheboro, to be specific.  Downtown, to be even more specific.  Kim, the lovely lady who runs the amazing place (seriously, locals…go there.  Drive NOW.  Do not stop.  Do not pass Go.  You won’t regret it.), has had a stock of my soap since she opened, and was quite interested in carrying the scents.  Since she’s out of soap at the moment (and I’ve not really made a whole lot more lately), I figured now was as good a time as any to break out the recipes I’ve had on the backburner for these.

There are six that I did today:  Sincerely Skin, Spring, Sprite, Sea, Sweet, and Spice.  I’ll describe them here in a second for you non-locals who can’t run down there and sniff.  There was a seventh, Sincerely Sun, but, to be honest, something went all kinds of wonky and smelled vaguely like ass on toast.  It needs reworking, clearly, since there are not many among us who want to smell like either ass or toast, much less both.

I’m a little in love with the labels.  I had to cut them out by hand, which took a lot longer than intended, but I trimmed while on a conference call that I really didn’t need to be there for, so it wasn’t all that bad.  But I love the look of the shaped labels, and might have to figure out a way to do this for other series, too.

Because what I really need to do is find a way to make things more time-intensive, right? :)

Anyway, the scents:

Sincerely Skin – Skin musk at its finest.  A combination of musks and a touch of heliotrope, with just a drop of something dirty and green.  It’s profoundly sexy, in a sex-hair kind of way.

Sincerely Spring - The ONLY floral that I’ve ever liked, if that says anything.  (I’m SO not a floral person.)  It’s a combination of wet, white flowers over rich earth, topped with a literal drop of white rose.  Gorgeous, and it lasted FOREVER on me.

Sincerely Sprite – Woodland greens, with resins and sparkling blondewoods.  There’s a bit of clary sage on the tail-end of it that makes it sparkle.  Think fairies in the woods, standing on mossy logs.  Seriously.

Sincerely Sweet – Lives up to its name, but without the biting OMG SUGAR going on.  Aged vanilla base, with peaches and pears, dripping with toasted marshmallows and sprinkled with rainbow sugar.  Despite the notes, it doesn’t go all top-heavy with the tooth-rotting sugars, but it’s definitely sweet.

Sincerely Sea – Stand next to the ocean, on an old wooden dock, while seagrasses lick your ankles.  It’s like that.

Sincerely Spice -  Best description I can think of is that it’s like finding a mahogany box full of precious resins and spices.  (Sans cinnamon, which almost always amps through the roof on most folks.)  Because of the resins, this one lasts FOREVER, and barely morphs on me.  I can still smell it on the place I tested it, and that was a good sixteen hours ago now, if that says anything.

Right now, they’re only available at Sincerely, but if you non-local folkses want one, just drop me a comment and I’ll put links in the sidebar.  She doesn’t sell online yet (that I know of), so it’d be the only way to get them unless you fly in and drive over there.  (Which I’d still suggest.  Awesome store.)

Total time today:  A whopping  4:53:28.  Whew.

Then tonight, it was this:

I fully admit that I was trying to bring it back around to the Earth Day thing, and thought this would make an awesome card/postcard.  It’s only two elements, but there were…uh…more.  They just weren’t worth keeping.  To be fair, I was pretty brain-fried after all the scent stuff, a huge meeting, and a dinner party (I baked a brie and asiago bread.  Everybody loves cheese.), and I’m still brain-spinny about the art journals from yesterday.  A couple people showed off creations of their own from it, and now all I want to do is make little journals all day long.

It’s a sickness.

total time: roughly an hour.  I totally forgot to set the timer, because apparently, I was distracted by Teh Shinee.  I’ll take the hit and only call it an hour anyway.

Tomorrow, I’m starting an easy week.  Scentwise, at least.  I have some reading I want to do (which totally counts), and I want to fix Sincerely Sun, but I need to read about certain chemicals first.  I also took a bunch of pictures on Saturday and Sunday that are being modified into stuff for ORT’s main street, so drawing will be taking place.  I know I wanted to do a daily scent start-to-finish, but that’s morphing as I go forward.  The education part of all this needs attention, so there we go.

ALSO…if you’re not in the US, and you wanted a tiny art journal…scroll down.  Apparently, when I cut off international shipping for physical goods, Paypal doesn’t let you rescind that just for downloadables, even though it would make sense to have different rules for downloads vs. mailings.  I can totally send you a link manually, though, if you want to play along with the tiny art journals, no matter where you are in the world.  Just let me know. :)

You’ll note I’m not opening this with a bottle of perfume.  I made one.  A good one.  A really vibrant, spicy, grounded one.  One I ended up wearing for the rest of the day, in fact.

However, since it’s a gift for some friends (there will be three in the series), and I’m sending vials of all three to each, they don’t have lables to make, and until the other two are done, there’s no point in doing the packaging until all three are done (for fit, blah blah blah), so it’s boring.  I have become, on Day 2, boring.  Already.

That’s gotta be some kinda record. :)

Total time: 1:06.  Not bad.  Not great, but I had a thing this afternoon.  I’m fine with it.

With the rest of the time I had, I made this:

All the little bits and bobs.  Word art.  Stars.  Drew an Earth and some trees and three kinds of frames (only one shown) and colored them to match the backgrounds.    About a dozen and a half embellishments altogether, I believe (including variants).  Clearly, I still kind of suck at layout, so I think I might move on to just showing journal pages every few days with the stuff.  Easier. :)

Time:  roughly 2 1/2 hours, which I’ll add up more precisely when I’m not falling over.  (It was done in spurts this morning, so there are *times* to add up, and that’s just beyond my comprehension level at the moment.  I’ve been up for, like, 22 hours or something ridiculous.)

I may be taking one of my free passes tomorrow and Sunday.  (And I might just switch it to monday through friday like a normal human being anyway.)  Today’s been…odd.

I mean, if you define “odd” as “WOW LOOK AT HOW DUMB YOU REALLY ARE”.  Which, apparently, I do.

Because some are concerned, no, I’m not dying or running from the police or anything.  I do not have some horrible disease, nor did Malcolm Gladwell come to my house to throw shoes at me for calling his hair scary.  Just a change in perspective.  Big one.

The only metaphor I can think of that’s close is to imagine that you have the most perfect carrot ever.  You love the carrot.  And then someone puts the carrot on a stick and you chase it.  You get out of bed in the morning because you need to chase the carrot.  You know that if someone would just get rid of that damned stick, the carrot would be back in your hands.

And then you find out that there is no stick, and that the carrot wasn’t ever there to begin with.

Why get out of bed?

A ton of things are like this, too.  We chase after some kind of imaginary, arbitrary goal in life — whether that’s money or beauty or what we interpret as righteousness — and we ignore all the other good stuff around us because if we could just get our goal — just get that job, buy that thing, do something somewhere sometime — we’d finally be happy.  Sure, it might get us out of bed, but what happens when you get what you want (or don’t, for that matter), and find yourself directionless?

Maybe the key is taking each one of the hours of your life and enjoying the living crap out of it.  Hold on to the little moments, the times the carrots are in your hands.  Develop a penchant for celery.  Something.

Be happy now.

Otherwise, ten thousand hours can seem like a lifetime.

p.s.  I took a job tonight with a company based in San Francisco.  This may change a few things.  We’ll see.