When Creativity Takes a Nosedive

What do you do?  When all you want to do is sit in the quiet and read...when you find yourself actually more interested in taking care of the laundry or vacuuming the floor...what do you do?  Creative Down Times don't happen to me very often, but I'm in the middle of one right now.  My saving grace is that I know that creative mojo will reassert itself, and pretty soon the laundry will be piling up and the floor will go unswept and I'll have painted whatevers drying all over the house.

Schultz really has nothing to do with Creative Dry Spells, but he has suffered through a few of them. 

But in the meantime, it's scary! 

So does this happen to you?  If so, do you do anything about it?  Do you wait it out?  Is there anything in particular that helps you out of it sooner?  Do tell.

April in South Texas

Playing with the new camera, still have a long way to go!  But while I was out, I got some good pictures of our place, blooming wild from the late winter rains.  (Praying for some late spring rains now, so we don't have a summer like last year!)

The slide show feature (click on the first picture) shows them to best advantage, but doesn't show text/captions, so maybe read first then see the slide show.  :~)

We live in a subdivision that is a mix of manufactured and site built homes, but the HOA keeps it tidy, requiring all the houses to be set way back from the road.  The average lot is an acre and a half.

Our back yard wild flower meadow...we don't mow the back part until they finish setting seeds.

This is Pete.  He guards the front door, and the rosemary.

The flower bed by the front door...some would say I have an odd sense of humor...

This is a volunteer Cilantro plant.  The seeds are known as coriander.

This is "Wild Indigo", and will (eventually) become a large shrub.  Supposed to be an insecticide plant, but so far it's just pretty.  It's also a relative of the pea type plants, which fix nitrogen and help enrich the soil.

Native Lantana, grows wild here.  The leaves smell like a horse's saddle blanket.  Seriously.

The veggie garden gate.  Schultz is waiting, because he LOVES veggies harvested here.  The rows on the left are asparagus, allowed to begin growing after some weeks of harvest.  The vine growing up the right side is a Sky Vine, and makes snap-dragon type flowers as big as your fist.  The garden has four sunken framed beds, each is 4' by 24' long, and a perimeter bed for herbs, roses, domestic grapes, and whatever else feels like climbing. 

This is the "Katrina Rose" or Peggy Martin climber, in one of the perimeter beds.  I planted it three springs ago from a one gallon container.  That's a six foot fence she's growing on, and she seems pretty happy there--not even in full bloom yet.  (That's bronze fennel and Italian oregano to the lower left.)

Peggy Martin was a rose grower in New Orleans.  When Katrina hit, this was the only rose of over three hundred varieties that survived the hurricane and subsequent salt-water flooding.

I have a messy veggie garden, but I love having poppies and native phlox growing wild among the beds.  The wildflower "weeds" attract pollinators and predator bugs which are useful, because we garden organically with no chemical insecticides or fertilizers.

This bed has nasturtiums, peas, morning glories, bottle gourds, onions, parsley, basil, and the last of the fading bluebonnets.  Eventually the vines will create shade for what grows underneath.

This is another native wildflower growing between the veggie beds, called Spiderwort.  Ugly name for such a beautiful flower!

This is Schultz (my constant companion) and a butterhead lettuce that I've let go to seed.  When I let them seed (they poof like milkweeds), they volunteer all over the garden so we have organic lettuce nine months out of the year.

This is dill, another volunteer from last year's seeding, and almost 5 ft tall already.  Butterflies go crazy over it, and I have to exercise restraint when I see caterpillars on it.  Between the good bugs, the bad bugs, the lizards, snakes, frogs and birds, Mother Nature creates a fine healthy balance without my help.

Poppies!  These are from seed given to me when I volunteered at the San Antonio Botanical Gardens.  I will have enough seed after all these bloom to supply everyone on my street!

The purple is larkspur, the funny pods are poppies--both average 3 to 4 ft tall.  The poppy seed pods dry hard and make wonderful nature crafts.  I plan to harvest these to teach my grandsons how to make tiny dolls.  Both the larkspur and poppies are from seeds scattered around last fall.  No planting required.

Indian Paintbrush, a native wildflower that went especially crazy this year.  Extremely hard to grow from seed or starts, so we let them seed as much as possible before mowing.  That's the main part of the wildflower meadow picture above.  There between the three large blossoms you'll see a tiny beneficial wasp looking for bugs.

This is a honeysuckle vine I planted three springs ago from a one gallon pot.  I have since rooted another five plants from cuttings of this one.  Used in Chinese herbal medicine, but I'm not familiar with the application.  I just grow it for the incredible fragrance and year 'round green.

Schultz is wondering when the cherry tomatoes will ripen so he can have some.  Sugar snap peas and asparagus are okay, but he luuuuuvs cherry 'maters.

Rehab is DONE.

We have tenants in there now, and they're such a sweet, cute couple.  Army Lady and Mr. Dad, two little girls, and a baby on the way in a few months.  My favorite part of the real estate biz is providing a good place to live where a family can be happy and make memories. 

I'd posted pictures of the place before, and was able to get "afters" this time--the contractor was only a week late on this one instead of a month and a half.  :~)  This is a picture-heavy post, but to my mind, they say way more than a thousand words.

Note the giant prickly pear patch...it was fifteen feet wide!

Still not sure I like the paint colors I picked, but our contractor did--he's using them on several of his houses now.

The previous owners had knocked down a wall to add space to the kitchen.  Once they established their bad layout, they got Creative With Plumbing.  This resulted in rotted cabinets and general nastiness.  We put the wall back to recreate the fourth bedroom.  Smaller kitchen, but it's clean and healthy now.
 

Rotted cabinets, weird plumbing, and pink walls...what's not to love?

New cabinets, appliances, and plumbing, better layout.

Looking over the bad cabinets into the dining area.

Not a lot of counter space, but a better dining area.

The flooring is a sort of vinyl tile that looks like wood and DOESN'T sound like laminate.  We put it through the entire house, and because it's vinyl, it works for the bathrooms too.

Living room before...

Living room after.

Ooh, mixed media paneling in the Man Cave!

Family room (man cave) after...new tenants have a pool table.  :~)

The bathrooms were a health hazard, but now there are new toilets and vanities, and a new shower in the master.  It's all contractor grade, but it's clean.

Front bath before...

Front bath after.

Master bath before

And after.

Seriously nasty shower.

New tile, squeaky clean.

The house was built in 1967, and apparently they don't make 8 ft bifold closet doors anymore (at least not that we could afford), and since the budget had already stretched to cover a few Rehab Surprises--like a new roof--we decided not to reframe the openings for now.  So I made curtains.  The tenants have two little girls and a baby boy on the way, and she was tickled with the colors of fabric I'd supplied.  The little girls think their closets are fun hideaways. 

All the bedrooms had rather interesting paint schemes...

I happen to LIKE interesting paint, but for a rent house, ya gotta go neutral.

I like wainscoting too, but not in a hallway.

Floor guys jacked up the tracks for the closet door...so, more curtains in a pale gold.

The tenants like to garden, and promised to take care of the plantings.  So I put a turk's cap by the front door and a climbing pink rose in the back.  This weekend I'll put in honey suckle and trumpet vine in the back too, so within a year they'll have flowers, fragrance, and hummingbirds to enjoy.  They plan to stay a couple of years, so they'll enjoy the fruits of their labor, and their kids will learn to take care of the landscape.

Welcome to the haunted house?

Still a little more trimming to do, but mostly finished.

~~<{+}>~~

Thanks for visiting our rehab!

I think I figured it out.

What it is about those hand-made, homely rag dolls that just appeal to me so much.  Maybe it's because they represent a child's ability to use her imagination...a time when a box of jacks, a jump rope, a pair of skates were GREAT toys. 

I'd like to think it only began in the last little while, but I know it's been developing for several decades: the atrophying of imagination in our children.  Sure the little ones still have it, but as soon as they get the first game (on whatever system you care to name), it begins.  I risk being thrown in with all the old farts that glorify "the good old days".  Maybe I belong there.  But here's an example of what I mean.

Once, when I was maybe ten years old, my Uncle G.A. (that's really what we called him) dropped by to bring something to my mom & dad.  I didn't know or care what he brought; grownup stuff, whatever.  What I remember vividly was that he had to go into the trunk of his car to get it.  Of course my sister and I had to stick our noses in.  And there...we spied these humongous nails in a cardboard box.  They were probably 8" long!  We were enthralled. Who knew they made nails that big?

Now, lest you think we had no toys, I had a Barbie (Miss America, I think) and roller skates and other fine toys--same as any middle-class American kid had growing up in the early '70's.  But we were so excited about those nails.  No, it didn't occur to my mom to be worried when Uncle G.A. gave us each what amounted to an 8" steel spike, but I distinctly remember my uncle laughing at our excitement over them, and telling Mom we really must need toys badly.  Mom answered that we could entertain ourselves for hours with a cardboard box.  (Maybe after that Uncle G.A. thought his nieces were a little slow, come to think of it.)

So how does this relate to rag dolls?  Because when I go to the thrift shop, there are TONS of toys.  Most of them--especially the dolls and stuffed animals--look to be in mint condition.  I admit this is not a new theme for me.  But today as I thought about the charm of a mom-made, early rag doll, the memory of our 8 penny nails resurfaced.  I'm surely romanticizing it, to think that a girl of the mid 1800's would rather have a rag doll made of Papa's pajamas if she COULD have a fine porcelain French Bebe.  Still, reading original accounts of surviving old cloth dolls, it's clear they were treasured, whether their features were crookedly drawn with charcoal or finely stitched in colored thread. 

I wonder if I gave my nine year old grandson an 8 penny nail (putting aside his horrified mother and the social workers for a second), how long, or even if, he would be entertained?  Likely he'd look at me like Granny Jan was nuts,
and ask if he could go in and play Take Over the Universe on Xbox.

Now it's time for me to toddle off to Old Fart Land and play with my dolls.  See ya.  :~)