Back to Work
I’ve been trying to be “sneaky.”
How’s that?
I’ve been trying to both keep this little piece of cyberspace going,
AND
follow Elder Bednar’s counsel to not let digital distractions (for me, facebook & blogging) detract from real life. I’m grateful that television programs and the like aren’t big time-suckers for me. “All” I really needed to do was unplug myself from this amazing bit of machinery and technology.
I’ve found two things:
One,
Wow, was I wasting more time here than I realized! Sheesh! At first I hardly knew what to do with myself.
Two,
The more I “unplug,” the more I find myself becoming creative*, and wanting to think. Funny, how plugging in here gives me an excuse to turn my brain off and ignore life. Is that what I really want? Even if cyberspace is full of wonderful and inspiring women (read: friends) who uplift and motivate me? It was time to quit spending hours and hours getting uplifted and motivated, and actually take it somewhere. I miss you, and I apologize for being sadly absent from your blog’s audience, but I’ll come back as soon as I figure out how to do it without wasting hours on here. It’s such a trap for me.
I started playing piano again. It’s been years since I’ve done more than just play what I learned a decade ago. Now I play practice every morning and most evenings. Scales, Hanon, the whole shebang. I’m learning a waltz from Chopin I’ve always loved. When I master it, I’m posting a video of it here. Won’t that be fun?!
*Note: By “creative” I didn’t mean artsy, just the desire to create. To make things. Fix things. Beautify our living space. To stop going to the store for every need and whim, but to use by brain and find solutions.
For example:
I want LONG skirts. It’s summer, it’s hot, and aside from feeling more beautiful and feminine, aside from the fact that my husband really loves it when I wear them, skirts are so much cooler and more comfortable than forever wearing pants. But…
Being cursed blessed with extra-long limbs, it is like a super-duper-extra-special treat to wear things long enough. Sleeves that come all the way down to my thumbs… heaven! Pants so long I actually step on the bottom hem… I drool. A skirt that swishes and all but comes to the floor… mmm….
There’s gotta be a way to repurpose stuff I already have.
Here’s round one:
I acquired this formal dress from a thrift store once upon a time. The bodice was hideous (definitely someone’s old choir dress) but the skirt part was lovely. Been carting it around for ages, waiting to do something with all this lovely fabric. Somehow or another it kept making the “cut” as I’ve decluttered.
So I evicted it from its place in a drawer and sliced the bodice off.
Lo and behold! That’s all I had to do! No joke, it was just the right size after simply spending 60 seconds with a rotary cutter! All these years I’ve been lacking a black skirt, and there was one waiting for me buried under all my crafting junk. Ha!
6yo photographer... yeah.
It's LONG!
Being who I am, I’m thinking… I’m NEVER going to tuck a shirt in, no matter how fashionable that look becomes. My waist is so dang short, I look like an old grandpa man with his pants hiked up to his armpits when I tuck things in. Really, I do, and I am SO glad the eighties are over! May they stay in our past forever.
So, yay-hooray for frugality, creating, and long, long skirts!
PS: That corner was embarrassing when I saw it behind me in that picture, so I finally fixed it. There may or may not have been pine-needles underneath all that junk. Mm-hm. Slacker mom repents!
Whew. All better!
Hey, eighties music could come back. I’d be OK with that.
I like your new skirt!
Thanks!
Very cute! If you have a hard time finding long skirts you can imagine how I feel!!! How tall are you anyway?
I really shouldn’t complain like I do – I’m not that tall, really. 5’9″ or so, but I’m pretty sure the more kids I have the shorter I get, though. (That’s exactly what I needed, you know, a shorter waist. Haha!)
Good for you for cutting down on your computer time. I’m trying to do that (desperately) also but still don’t have a master plan so seem to sneak things in here and there…like right now…oops. It’s bad and I’m just beginning to see exactly how bad it is.
And I also use the internet to find ‘inspiration’ when I KNOW my real inspiration is right in my own heart and right in my own home. So why is it so hard to give up my fake world of inspiration?? Maybe it is the usual isolation issue women have being at home, and realizing that you can now really dig a woman who lives many states away from you. I’ve never even met face-to-face one of my two ‘best friends’. Weird! But still, how often do my kids need to come into the room to see my face hovering over a computer? What is their view of me going to be once they are grown? Something important for me to ponder.
see now this story argues the virtues of keeping stuff. uh oh! but i’m just being facetious here. i too am finding the need to declutter almost overpowering. and i like long skirts. i keep thinking that we need to be friends. or better, in real life friends. we like all that homeschooling, constitutional stuff too. i have a feeling my husband and your husband could probably debate for hours, happily. we’ll have to figure it out sometime.
anyway, i’m still reading your blog, i’m just not so good at commenting lately! i’m not sure how you do it with 4 kids, i only have 2 and am overwhelmed.
You’re so funny! It’s true, though. It does argue the “toss everything” idea. Maybe I should mention that the only way I found that black dress (not to mention time & motivation) was by tossing a lot of things I used to think I needed.
AND YES! Let’s get together sometime. Really. It would be way fun.
I’m in the opposite camp: my skirts can’t go much beyond my knees, or I look stubby. Not a good look in general. But, I’m totally with you on the skirts. I have five skirts for every pair of shorts I own–WAY more comfortable, and I just look better.