The Open Journal

Stream of Consciousness Writer's Warm-up

I find this kind of writing insightful and cathartic.

Start:
My hens Rusty and Six are walking on the porch railing again. Rusty is an Americauna with mostly rust colored feathers with a black tail and black accents on her wing.  Six is a speckled hen called a Barred Rock. I can't believe how big they are now.  They should be laying eggs soon. Now the other barred Rock Mary has jumped up to join them.  Her whole name is Bloody Mary because when she was a chick she got in with the older hens and they about pecked her to death. She seems fine now though.

I stayed up until 2 AM listening to Amy Winehouse and Joan Baez on Youtube. I love both of their styles but they are so different. I can sing like Joan Baez sort of but I'd really like to learn how to sing like Amy Winehouse.  It is a strange twist of fate that Joan is older than me, yet still alive and Amy died in her early 30's.

It is hard to concentrate with chickens bopping around the porch.
I have nagging guilt that I'm not working out. I never meant to stop being a dancer. I regret that it somehow all slipped away from me.

I am not being productive. I feel like I can't get off top dead center with getting my life organized. It depresses me. I went to what I like to call the Fire Hazard Thrift Store. It is run by a little ole lady and is so bursting at the seams that most of the house is full of boxes so she'll never sell those things because no one can get anywhere near them.  If she wants to sell things on the covered patio, she should have that portion be her store and shut the rest off from the public because it is a disaster. And then I thought that my house is the same way; an embarrassment.  My boyfriend had magical thinking when it came to buying this place.  I can't fit everything in it. Things are getting ruined. I don't know what to do.

Apple Valley's rain on Thursday never made it to Lucerne Valley, CA.

I am glad the heat of summer is tapering off. It is not as brutal as a week ago. I'm sure we'll get plenty of hotter days but they will be broken up by some rain or some clouds or some wind.

I want to sew. I bought a ton of patterns.  But it is too hot to sew in my container and too crowded in the house. But perhaps if I devote the next hour to it I can do some hand sewing before my boyfriend comes home. Then again if I'm sewing, I'm not writing now am I?

I'm trying to do 10 things at once. I have never figured out how to be myself when my boyfriend is around, so if I want to do any singing or music stuff I need to do that before he gets home too. I'm not blaming him. I'm just self conscious.

And I'm tempted to just go into the hypnosis chat room, but if I do that the day will disappear before I think to look around me again. Plus I'm trying to save bandwidth. Sigh. If it is not one thing, it is another.

I'd like to organize my room too and make it calm and appealing.

I went to a yard sale and scored an unwrapped DVD of the Black Swan.  So excited that I'll get to see it again. I saw it at the theater but I'm sure I missed some plot details.

That's it for today. Leave comments below.

Rainy Day in December

I've been trying to figure out my mood today. I woke up to the sound of rain in my backyard. Which doesn't sound all that amazing until I point out we haven't had rain of any quantity in maybe six months. Even with the rain the birds were still singing in the tree outside my window. I hadn't expected rain so my boyfriend had to make a quick dash out to the patio to put the flintknapping tool bucket out of harms way. Everything in there will have to be dried out later. But for now he just pushed it under the patio table out of the rain.

My plans to go to the post office and library flew out the window as my old truck doesn't have windshield wipers so I don't drive it in the rain. My boyfriend had an appointment at the beach with a photographer so I find myself home all alone. Too sick to go out, too bored to stay in, you know the drill.

So I read my library book, the Trouble With Magic, for a while, but I found I was dozing off. So I signed on to upload 4 days of daily self portraits. I do take them every day, but I don't necessarily get around to uploading them to the Flickr group every day. When I am sick and bored, it's not much fun doing self portraits, but it's real. It's tempting to skip those days. But the whole point of 'a daily self portrait' is to see the depth of who you are, not just what you look like when you are dressed up and presentable and going out to a party. And sometimes I hate the way I look at the moment of taking it, but months later when I look back on it, it's not so bad as I thought, because our eyes are clouded by our moods at the time.  It's hard to watch my face and body aging. So the daily self portrait becomes painful at times. It would be more fun to take them in reverse, starting at 100 and aging backwards. Seeing all the jowls, wrinkles, crows feet, excess weight and sagging gradually going away, like in the movie Benjamin Button.