So I go away for three and a half days with highly limited computer access (just a brief chance on Friday to check email). I come back to over a hundred personal emails, not quite that many work emails, various and sundry forum postings at the Glass Haven, bunches of Tweets, and over 350 things in Google Reader. The emails are caught up, as are the forum postings, but Google Reader is only down to 217 entries. Of course, when you get 150-200 postings to Google Reader on many days, it’s no wonder that’s taking a while to catch up.

It doesn’t help that I came back tired from not enough sleep in a strange bed. That led to essential naps both yesterday and today. Nor does it help that my fabulous purple suede ankle boots were never meant to be worn for a sixteen hour day spent mostly on my feet on hard floors or walking back and forth across a college campus. My feet are still trying to recover from the resulting blisters and major swelling.

Then there’s the grading. Let’s not even talk about that, ok?

How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time, my friends, one bite at a time.

I figure tomorrow’s show (the first annual GPC Artisan Craft Fair) is a crap shoot.  I am just taking bead stuff, no books, because I know I can fill up a six-foot table with just my and Mincot’s bead stuff.  I’ll have loose beads because I know some people do make their own jewelry, but I’ll be kind of surprised if I sell many of them.  Earrings and Chinese threader necklaces, who knows?  What I expect to go is those little wonky bead tree ornaments because they are cheap!

I do have hopes for the new boro pendants.  They are definitely out of the ordinary! *I* like them — whether other people will or not, we’ll see.

And of course I will have the most important item with me — that GOOD ATTITUDE that is so important!

Ahhh, Thanksgiving break.  A whole five-day weekend, no classes to teach and no meetings to attend.  Never mind that I have my parents, the Offspring, and Mincot coming for Thanksgiving lunch; I’m working at Good Mews on Saturday for adoption counseling;  the GPC  Artisan Craft Fair is in two weeks and I need to take at least some of those beads that didn’t sell and turn them into jewelry (the good beads) and ornaments (the wonky ones); the Glass Haven needs some attention — did I say this was a break?  Silly me!

Thank you, my DH, for reminding me that I’d forgotten to blog today and saving me from letting the challenge slip thru my fingers after 20 days!

Flaming Hot’s Tuesday Tip is to have more than one creative outlet, so that when your creativity goes south in one area, you have something else to work on.  This shifting gears lets other parts of your creative energies get exercised while the exhausted area rests, and is supposed to get you back on track more quickly.

I’ve actually been doing this for a long time.  Back when I was a weaver, I almost always had two different projects going on two different looms.  Often I’d be designing and warping up one project while I was weaving off the other, which worked because those are actually two very different processes.  Or, if I only had one weaving project going and it just wasn’t working at the moment, I could turn to my spinning wheel and just Zen out with some fiber.  Before that, I’d have two needlework projects, or a needlework project and something else, going so that I could switch back and forth.

With lampwork it’s a little bit different, though.  If the boro isn’t working today, I can drop the kiln temperature and switch over to soft glass.  If beads are acting poopy, I can play with off-mandrel work and make pendants or marbles.  Still, there are days when the glass just isn’t working. Then I turn off the torch and pull out the crochet, or the spinning wheel, or put together a book, or even work on my web site.  Or, for that matter, I can go read, or vegetate, or sleep!

Even at work I tend to do this!  I can only work so long on one thing there before I have to switch gears and do something else.  I sometimes wonder how I managed to teach class for four and a half hours straight without going nuts — that’s a long time to be doing ANYTHING without a change of pace.

I don’t know if I work better under pressure, but I certainly get more done under pressure.  With the holidays looming on the horizon, the bead show this weekend, family and friends coming next week for Thanksgiving dinner, and the end of the semester around the corner, I have a lot on my agenda.

In the past couple of days I have done much of the planning for the show as well as getting stuff together for it.  The bed risers and new lighting are in my studio waiting to be packed into the car Friday night.  I have put a large dent in the grading backlog, particularly for my introductory class, and the pile is back down to a somewhat manageable size now (at least until next week’s test). I keep seeing and taking care of little bits here and there around the house in preparation for a bigger cleaning early next week.  Today at work, I defragmented the hard drive on my work computer and installed Ubuntu Linux to make it a dual-boot system (completely against our IT rules, of course, but with absolutely no issues) so that I can be happier with my computer use there.

I feel like there’s still an insane amount to do right away but it doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming now that I am getting a few things dealt with.  Deep breath, let it out slowly, decide on the next thing to tackle!