Okay – I’m in.

You only have to spend a little time trolling the Internet to find all sorts of  ‘X a day’ type activities, where X might be a photo a day, or a scrapbook page a day, or 750 words a day, or a self portrait a day or…. you get the idea. There are no end of them. I’ve set myself writing challenges – most recently using 750words.com to write the equivalent of 3 pages per day for a month. Its all good. Practice means improvement, after all.

The Internet and social networking has upped the ante on these challenges – suddenly there are communities and virtual teams and support and ideas all a few clicks away. Feel yourself losing enthusiasm? There’s always someone on the ‘team’ to cheer you on. Or you can just do your thing in silence.

Yesterday I was reading and came across 30Days of Creativity. As the site says:  

‘30 Days of Creativity is a social initiative encouraging people to create stuff (anything) every day for 30 days in June.
Your brain is like a muscle. When you exercise it, it gets stronger.’

I was intrigued, but then I thought what I always think about these things. ‘I’ll be away and so won’t be able to participate’ And then I thought ‘You know, maybe it is just time to let go of that thinking’.

The fact of things is that we travel a lot. In 2010 we have been away for at least one night of each month, excepting  May, and looking at the rest of the year so far only September has no travel plans (yet). Waiting for the perfect pristine block of time – it ain’t going to happen, and that is how it is. And I’m not complaining. I’m so lucky to be able to go to so many interesting places, and then return to my wonderful home.

In April I decided that I wanted to take a fitness class and signed up for a five week session of Zumba, knowing that I would be away for one class. Well, I loved it, can’t wait to do some more in July. And as is so often the case – life interfered and I got to three of the five sessions. Which is three more than I would have gotten to if I had said - ‘Oh well, I’ll be away, no point in  signing up'.

So – you know what? I’m in to create something everyday in June. Let’s see how it goes. I’ll post a weekly summary here of what I’ve done. And rather then just working away on my own I’m going to participate in the 30 Days site. Which means brushing up my Twitter and Flickr skills, among other things.

And…. here I go!

Catching up

Oops – sorry about that. Didn’t mean to leave you looking at Wilf and his new Vegas friends for quite that long. Here – look at some rhododendrons instead:

 

That’s last year’s picture, of r.Sappho, taken on May 16. This year, on May 30, Sappho hasn’t cracked a bud yet – getting close, but we’re about two weeks behind in the whole flower department.

We enjoyed our time in Las Vegas, then moved on to San Diego – spent about a week mostly hanging around Mission Beach, riding bikes and walking. There was some fishing in San Diego, no catching though.

April was a busy month for me with quilting – I took a two workshops with Martha Cole, went to a quilting retreat with friends in Qualicum Beach and another retreat here in town. Those adventures merit their own blog post, which will follow.

It became clear that waiting for warm weather to get to the serious garden clean up was going to be a long wait. We’ve been out hacking and pulling and digging and hauling. Things are definitely looking better, but we have many wheelbarrows full to haul yet.

Last spring we decided to renovate the back yard and remove a bunch of lawn, especially the slopey bits. We went from this:

to this:

and now we’re at this:

Much better. On the east side of the yard similar lawn reduction occurred. What lawn that is left needs a little work, which means….

Sadly we have not been able to convince the dirt to come up to the back yard by itself, so we take turns hauling barrowfulls up from the driveway. The moss has pretty much been beat into submission, the rain has abated enough that it isn’t a mud hole – we’ll get there eventually!