My freedom: quirks

Shimelle challenged us today to blog about our quirks - those things we love and find inspiring that other people just don't seem to get.

It occurred to me that the thing that most people in my 'real' life don't get is the very thing that brings most of us together in my internet neighbourhoods.

Making stuff.
Kel's cat sleeps
Most of the people I meet on a day to day basis just don't think that making stuff is fun, cool or even normal. I find it very hard to explain that I spent the weekend with a bunch of people playing with art stuff. Most people I know just wouldn't get why I've spent the last two days working my fingers off working on another one of these. But you do, right?

Yep, that's us, we're quirky!

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My Freedom: pace of life

As part of the My Freedom project over on Shimelle.com, we were given the blogging prompt today:


How do you prefer the pace of life? Do you wish things would speed up or slow down?

The kneejerk reaction is to say "slow down!" In truth though, I don't know how true that is. My lovely was born in Orkney and raised there and in Shetland. As much as we love to visit, we have discussed it and neither of us would want to move back somewhere that quiet.

If I have too many days in a row with no structure, I tend to float around and waste the day, not even luxuriating in the freedom. I get far more done if I have a lot to do. Then when I'm too busy I long for periods of uninterrupted time.

I guess the answer, as so often, is balance. Which is no surprise. Farmers, religious leaders, educators all tell us that we need time to grow and time to rest, time to play and time to work, time to give and time to receive, time to create and time to think. As I start the second year of working part-time and a new course, I hope that I will find more balance - some routines and commitments to hang the week on, some blocks of focused time for creating and some down time.
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My Freedom: Time

Watches I'm doing another class with Shimelle. It's called My Freedom and while we don't know exactly how it's going to go yet, it's meant to be personal, spontaneous and reflective.

Today we were taking pictures on the theme of time. I realised that I have three little quirks related to time.

This is a photo of my little drawer of watches. Don't ask me why I have so many old watches. I don't even have stories for them all or anything. I keep my watch pretty basic, I've been given a Seiko twice in my life, the rest of the time it's a basic Timex or Swatch.

The second little story is all about how I don't now wear a watch. I used to wear one all the time. Last Easter my watch battery gave up at the beginning of a week. I freaked out! I had no time to replace the battery and surely I couldn't function without a watch!!! Yeah, well, 15 months later I still haven't put my watch back on and I'm fine. I do my job, I meet my friends and if I'm late, it's NOT because I don't know what time it is.

The quirkiest detail is that those kinetic watches don't work for me. Generally they work by storing the energy produced as you move, especially your hands. Well, I don't know whether it is the way I talk with my hands, or how busy my hands can be at times, but with me they get all over-energised and go racing ahead. This happens with good-quality, well maintained watches.



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