the jar of awesome revisited - again

A couple of days into the new year it hit me: I had completely forgotten to open the Jar of Awesome! So I did. (Truth to be told, the notes had, by the end of the year, to be stores in two separate jars because there was so many of them...)

I then sat down and read them all, and was in some cases surprised by the things I had written about - I had never guessed that they would be so different, rather expected most of them to be about things like training... I also decided to repeat the project this year.

 Earlier posts about the project can be found here and here.

Door project photos

Before cleaning up...

...and after.

as seen from the hall

Here are some pictures of the door "painting" I wrote about yesterday. I chose to let the text continue in the small, lower window, as can be seen below. Medium: regular water colors.

Let me in let me in let me in!!!!!

My cat is not spoiled

disgusting "head"-end of now former cat toy

tiny craft project

Yay! New prey!

I do confess: miss Cat only "plays" with them to be nice, when she wants to be scratched or fed, or just needs the attention.

Aura river photographic expedition

One thing you can chose to do (for free!) if you, as I actually complained about in the last post, have too much time off, is to go on your own photographic expedition. I decided to do this yesterday, and  went for a long walk with the simple plan of snapping pictures of anything nice or interesting that comes my way. As a route I chose to go along the Aura river, on both sides. I had planned for this to be an early-morning walk, but lost track of time and found myself out walking in the blazing mid-day sunshine in close to 30 degrees heat. It was still fun - nice to walk around acting like a tourist in your own town!

Posted some of the photos on google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/107842808026424646494/posts

(Quite often I've posted pics here on the blog and the a link here on my google page but I'll just do it the other way around this time)

The jar of awesome - revisited

Remember back in January when I wrote about the Jar of awesome project? Well, this week I guess you could say I updated it a bit...

 The plan was not to open the jar before next new year's, but just about six months into the project, the jar was absolutely packed with little notes...

 ...so I emptied it, but saved all the notes in another place for later...

...and made a brand new start with new ones. Now I can watch it grow again. (For more details, go to my previous post on the same project.)

One jar of awesome

I first saw this idea over at facebook, and immediately thought I should try it myself!

So, in short, the idea is: Every time something good happens, big or small, write it on a little note and save it in your jar of awesome! Next New year's eve, open the jar and look at all the good things that have happened to you all through the year!

So I found a big jar I used to store beans in...

...and pimped it up a bit...

Why, yes, that is a cat hair on the lid.

...and chose some nice papers for writing the notes...

...and slowly started adding them to the jar.

This also makes the jar nice to look at. I keep it in my kitchen, as the old bean jar it is. I've already realised the jar might be too small, as this is one of those projects that really helps you notice the small positive things in a day!

About art again

I don't have that absolute rush of creative energy anymore, the one I found (or that found me) about a month ago, but I'm still surfing on it. So there's still progress but I don't stay up late to work every night. I should still focus a biiit more on my essays and other assignments, of course, but what can I do? One of the new... features? ...materials..? I've been using in my present work is cosmetics. I've included both eyeshadow and nail polish in the painted parts of the artworks.The nail polish came quite naturally, as I seem to have a fascination for drawing hands right now. Why am I writing about my art without posting pictures? I don't know, maybe because I'm simply excited?
Sometimes it's hard to tell whether a post like this one really belongs in this blog, or if it should be posted in my art blog instead. But the art blog more focused on pictures. I will be posting pictures soon enough, just have to get things a bit more finished and then borrow a camera.

project of the week

This week I've forced myself to get up early every morning, even on mornings when I haven't had to "be anywhere". I guess you could say it's one of my long-term projects, only for some reason I haven't been able to keep it up before. I've always been jealous of morning people! Of course it's only been a couple of days yet, but I really hope I'll manage to stick to this. I like having more hours in the day (without staying up until the small hours), and I have noticed geting more things done in a day, so that's good I guess. The thesis has not been touched even once in the entire week, though. A bit ashamed of that. But hopefully I'll get back to that next week! Next week I'll also be attending my first karate course of this year, looking forward to that a lot! I haven't attended one since october, and it's definitely been too long! There will be a lot of them coming up this spring, which is good but with the major ones (two in March, one in June) all being abroad, it will also be quite heavy economically. Getting too sleepy to write now (at 9.30 in the evening, I can't believe it!), I think I'll return home to get some sleep... ...as soon as I've managed to forget ow blisteing cold it's outside.