6 Months Later…

Well, shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

It’s been just under 6 months since I last posted anything here. Between work and working on my health and wellness (more about that over at LessISMoreHealthy on YouTube.) I haven’t had time to make art other than for work and certainly not to write up dedicated posts about it.

I’ve learned a lot about balance over the last few months and the balance had to shift toward taking care of my health, else, in the words of my nurse practitioner, I die young after living with a reduced quality of life. She was kinder about it than that, but still. This is not my place to directly discuss my health, but I’m now significantly healthier- my numbers during bloodwork are better and most of all, I FEEL better.

It’s dramatic, but I’m going to lean into it, walking and riding my bike has changed my life.

It’s funny, I had to pick up a few things at Wally World and Tarjaaaay when I spotted the Back to School display and decided it was time to make a return to writing a bit about stationery. So I picked up a few gel pens and, you guessed it, composition notebooks. After making this decision and sitting on the tools to be reviewed for a week, I received a DIRE warning from my hosting company. Fix the spambot problem with my blog or get it removed from their servers.

Yikes.

So I spent this morning, updating all the wordpress plugins that I had set to manual, which was fine when I was regularly updating and looking at the admin panel of this blog on the regular. Now, all the important anti-spam stuff is set to auto-update and I can breath a little easier.

I also realized that NONE of the comments and feedback had gone to my email as it’s supposed to, so if you have reached out to me after February of 2023 and I didn’t get back to you, well, it’s not you, it’s me and my obstinate need to control all aspects of my blog until I ignore it completely for 6 months and never update stuff so things end up disappearing… Yeah. Sorry about that.

No promises here, but as my health has improved (I still have to majorly focus on it for at least another year to get my numbers back where they need to be, but progress is progress and should be celebrated) I realize I also need to focus on the MANY other things in my life that bring me joy and happiness. Which of course, includes art and writing.

As an aside, as I write this, and reflect on a work email I had to draft yesterday, WOW is my writing out of practice. That email I wrote yesterday read worse than anything I’ve written in many years.  So I’m going to work on wring again.

 

Another Month Goes By

It seems I update this here blog once a month or so. I used to be so good at updating all my social media and cross promotion, now I get a video uploaded and I forget to announce it anywhere and everywhere. Go figure.

I have been uploading nearly Daily Vlogs to my new Channel Less IS More Healthy, which I started to document my journey into becoming more healthy. It’s not lecture-y or preachy, just me documenting my walks with weirdo little videos and playing around with video making techniques and talking about the efforts I’m making to change my health. It’s super important to me and keeps me accountable about my efforts. If you are interested head over and have a watch, maybe like and subscribe. The most recent video is here:

Getting Healthy on A TIGHT Budget

I’ve also cut back on the number of art videos I’m uploading. The amount I was loading per week/month wasn’t sustainable. Also I’m now in SHOW SEASON at work, which means a lot more work coming up! Here are the art based videos for this month:

Etching Glass

Foam Texture Plates on the gel plate

Making Foam Texture Plates

And a Art Vlog

My Pocket Notebook Habit

A Month of Videos

I have loaded up a bunch of new videos this past month. It’s wild to think that it’s already February. I hope y’all are staying warm out there!!!

In a bit of news, I have moved my health and wellness content over to it’s own channel. I found that anytime I mentioned my health on Comfortable Shoes Studio YT people left, in droves. So, the new channel is Less is MOre Healthy and I’m doing accountability vlogs and documenting my walks with my weird little videos. I’m still doing vlogs on the Comfortable Shoes channel but they will be specific to art and creativity.

VLOGS:

Vlog 027

VLOG 028

VLOG 029

VLOG 030

Continue reading

Values Journaling Worksheet

I have been working on a video about values journaling. This is the blog post for that video.

Start your values journaling with this worksheet:

values list

Circle all the things on the list that are important to you. EVERYTHING.

Then organize them into similar linked lists, try to get it to 10.

Write about each of the 10 lists/words.

Don’t do this in one sitting. Spend some time with each topic. Write at least page in your journal for each one.  Ask yourself why is this important to you? Why did you pick this? Go deep. Now go deeper.

Now take each theme and explore it in your art journal.

The hardest question you will ask for each theme/topic is: Am I living up to this value right now? If so how? If not how can I? What changes can I make in my life to align my life with my values?

When you start to think about changes, remember that you’ll need to break each one into small manageable steps to make achievable goals. (Check out SMART goals.)

Here are some questions to ask yourself after you’ve found your words and are exploring your responses.

values-discussion-questions

James Clear’s value’s journaling post, check out his section about his integrity report. He’s got good questions there.

Art Journaling Video

I posted a new art journaling video. This one using a ton of personal ephemera from my life. Just things I’ve amassed over the last few weeks. If you’ve seen any of my VLOGS you’ll recognize some of the stuff.