Zentangle® – November 2016

We were traveling for more than a week in November – but that did not slow we down creating Zentangle® tiles at all. I’ve chosen 10 tradition tiles from the collection. I like colored tiles and inks…although I tend to return again and again to black as my favorite it. This month I have tended to not use as much shading…that is something to improve in December.

I did some not traditional Zentangle items in November. My favorite was owls. I got the idea from a Sue Jacobs blog post and promptly dug through the recycle basket in the upstairs of my housed and found a lot of empty toilet paper rolls to work with. The Ultra Thin Point Sharpie worked well for me. I positioned the owls on top of balsa wood sticks my daughter had bought in bulk when she was in high school and I had stuck in a large vase just waiting (years) for the owls to come along! I start with the eyes then just go from there.

And here are close-ups of the rest of the owls!

I took my car in for service in November and came back with the ‘number’ tag they use to track the car during the service…big red and green numbers…. Hard to resist overlaying a tangle pattern on them!

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The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. "Zentangle" is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.

Zentangle® – August 2016

The time spent creating Zentangle® tiles seems like islands of calm focus that fit within the context of the rest of life so easily. Perhaps they fit because they are not overly time consuming….or because the rhythm of creating at least one a day has become a habit…a habit that I enjoy.

I’m still cutting tiles from folders with battered edges from my daughter’s years in public school. The boxes of old school paper are finally being cleaned out and we are only keeping a few mementoes rather than every paper. I enjoy the colored tiles.

Different colors of ink are a change too. I may go through a stage when I am back to off white tiles and black in sometime too --- but not in the near term.

Enjoy the slide show of 31 Zentangle tiles for August!

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The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. "Zentangle" is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.

Zentangle® - May 2016

I’ve selected 31 Zentangles to include in this post since there are 31 days of May. Five that I chose were made on the back of old business cards – so did not display well with the square slide show of tiles. I liked them too much to pick others so I’m displaying them first. Some are plant like…

Others start out as webs….

Or loops.

I was inspired by art nouveau books I found on Internet Archive and Hathi Trust as well.

Those same themes show up in the tiles as well. The tiles also are some new colors this month. I was cleaning out boxes of brochures and old folders; instead of putting everything into recycling, I used some of the heavier paper to cut tiles: red, yellow, and rust. I also found some dusty poster board that had probably been on the shelf for 10 years that I cut up into 3.5 x 3.5 inch tiles!

Enjoy the May slideshow!

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The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. "Zentangle" is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.

Organizing Every Day

When I ended my formal career a few years ago, I realized that the way I organized my days would change significantly. The big chunk that was the 40+ hour work week plus commute time (sometimes adding 10+ hours to the work week) was not going to be the big rock that I needed to organize around. There is a lot more freedom in my post-career days.

I choose to have a few rhythms. From the very beginning, I’ve included a daily blog post, some journal writing, and some reading. The goals have changed over time and sometimes become minimized when there is an overwhelming amount of other activity (like traveling). I’ve added a daily Zentangle in the past year or so. The only weekly rhythm that I’ve retained is grocery shopping; I do it on a weekday morning rather than a weekend morning like I did when I was in the thick of my career.

Some things I’ve kept from my career days.

• I still have a calendar – mostly for things that are away from home. And I share it with my family just like I used to share my work calendar with my staff. The calendar is not as full….and everything on it is something I want to do! Those activities are easy to plan around….they are the only things that have to occur at a particular date and time!
• There are also projects that I organize for myself. Right now I am in the thick of scanning our old slides from the 1970s and 1980s. It is quite a project and will probably take me months. But I’m the one that determines how fast it proceeds. I usually set a goal for my projects (like hours per day) and then just finish them at that pace. I’ll do another blog post with more on my scanning project in a week or so.
• I’ve continued my early mornings. Just because I don’t have to get up and get to work does not mean that I am not up before 6 AM these days….and without the aid of the alarm clock that made sure I was up at exactly the same time every work day morning! The early morning is my favorite time to get off to a fast start on whatever is in store for the day.

Zentangle® - April 2016

Several changes this month:

• I am doing a selection at the end of the month – forcing the number of Zentangles® in this post to be no more than the number of days in the month.
• I bought some colored pens used them for the tiles I made while I was in Texas then left them as a gift. I’ll buy myself another set sometime in May.
• Toward the end of April, my husband and I bought a scanner to digitize all our older pictures and slides….and it works for Zentangle tiles as well. This is the first month for scanned versions of the tiles and they do look better than the photographic method I had used previously.

Enjoy the slide show of the April Zentangles!

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The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. "Zentangle" is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.

Projects

Old habits die hard. My whole career was built around projects – things that has a plan, with milestones, and culminated in something. Now I find myself organizing some aspects of retirement that same way – into clumps of activities that are very focused on an objective.

Virtually all of our vacations are projects – with a definite plan, some pre-vacation study or activities, and then the vacation itself. Afterward I almost always write some blog posts about it so that wraps up the project. You’ve probably noticed the series of posts about Hawaii and Tucson most recently.

Another type of project is the Winter Tree Hike at Belmont guide I developed as part of my project to become a Master Naturalist in Maryland. That’s one I have finished recently. Now I need to create the Spring/Summer version.

I’m starting a group of photography projects around themes like model trains, seed pods, stumps or reflections. They are not as cleanly projects since the ‘end’ will be determined by the accumulation of enough images to warrant a blog post on the topic!

It always feels good to put the last flourish on a project; it is the biggest appeal for thinking about collections of activities as a project rather than just activities that merge with all the continuing activities of day to day life.

Different in 2016

Now that we are more than a month in to 2016 – I am getting serious about what habits I want to tweak this year. They are a little different than a ‘resolution’ or a goal because of the way I am thinking about them as habits. Habits are the things I do almost without thinking and there are strategies for changing them that apply.

The most significant one I am changing (not the optimism) is to stop drinking soft drinks entirely. Late last year I stopped using artificial sweeteners (and didn’t start using sugars) except for those in the Diet Pepsi. It’s time to stop the soft drink habit both because there is no nutritional benefit (and may harm), they are some of the heaviest items in my grocery bags, and the plastic bottles are a significant contributor to the recycle ‘trash’ bulk. I tried the strategy of just stopping suddenly and that didn’t work very well. I fell off the wagon after a few weeks. Now I am color coding the days on my calendar: red if I have a soft drink, green if I don’t. We’ll see if that works. Concurrently – I am developing drinks (water with a little black cherry juice is my current favorite) that I can have in lieu of a soft drink. So I am applying habit changing strategies:

• Make is conscious rather than automatic by calling attention to it (color coding my calendar)
• Develop a substitute habit (another drink choice)

Another habit that I am changing is when I wear my glasses. I have worn glasses or contact lenses virtually all my waking hours since I was in third grade. In the past few years, I have noticed that I am very comfortable reading on my tablet without my glasses. Just recently, I’ve discovered that quite a lot of what I do on my computer can be done without my classes. I tried it because I noticed that I was holding my head at an angle (to look through the part of the lenses for the best computer distance vision) that lead to quiet an ache in my neck and shoulders by the end of the day. The neck and shoulder problem is totally resolved by not wearing my glasses as much when I am at my computer so – we’ll see if I continue to like using the computer without glasses…. or whether I get some glasses specifically made for use at the computer.

Giving up soft drinks and not wearing my glasses as often are going to be challenging…just as breaking any long duration habit always is. I don’t think I could tackle 10 things like this…but 2 – I should be able to focus enough to change these habits.

Zentangle® – December 2015

It’s now been a full year of Zentangle®-a-day. It’s become an easy habit to maintain. Did I draw more spirals and fiddleheads in December with Hawaiian vegetation as my inspiration – maybe. I also continued to name my Zentangles. Can you find the one I titled ‘female cyclops’?

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The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. "Zentangle" is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.