Where are you stuck?

Today tastes like essence of celery seed, wormwood, and cinnamon oil, served on a bed of raw garlic. Total meltdown.

It's been an era in and of itself (Meltdown Man??? Carrying a cellphone, an iPod, and a quadruple shot espresso?) this past weekend. Got done with a roller coaster week at work (busy. Getting demand packages out and out and out, telling stories, kicking ass, and chewing gum. And they make me spit out the gum when I walk through the doors, so that only leaves two things to do . . .) and looking forward to dinner with friends on Friday night. Unwind. Relax. Watch some movies, do some knitting and think about cleaning the paper studio so I can do some work this winter while it's nice and cool.

Then we pop by the house to put some wine for dinner in the fridge (hurrah for restaurants without liquor licenses and no corkage fees!!!) and there's a message on our answering machine. Or rather, half a message. The first half of a collect call.

Gareth and I look at each other. If it was an emergency, wouldn't they call our cell phones? Even if they had to call collect for some unknown reason, most anyone who knows us has our cell digits, and knows that's the fastest way to get hold of us . . . say, the jails out here only let you call collect. And right about then, the phone rang again.

Crisis number one: a friend of ours had been arrested for something we thought was over. Note bene: check all the statutes before running a business, and get at least three opinions from legal experts. Loopholes can turn into hangman's nooses.

So . . . her husband currently does not have a land line, and you cannot call a cell phone number from inside the jails. Ours was the only land line number she knew cold, because of course, she doesn't have access to her cell phone. Or a charger, even if she did. We spent a bunch of our weekend playing operator so she and husband could communicate (long story short, he's not able to visit her as he's a co-defendant in the matter we thought was more or less settled and waiting for grand jury.)

Crisis number two: We got to dinner Friday, and another friend had a sudden death in her close-knit family. She needed a shoulder to cry on, so we spent a large part of the remainder of Friday holding her hand and patting her head.

Crisis number three: Remember when the truck broke down twenty miles outside of Globe? Well, the garage was able to fix the truck, but had no one available to drive it any closer to town. So we got up at o'work thirty on a Saturday, and drove over to Globe (ninety minutes one way) to fetch our errant vehicle back. Not so much of a crisis, but that is one boring drive. And it eats up most of the morning, even when you get up early and hit the road right away.

Where am I feeling stuck after this weekend? I'm feeling stuck because every time I walk through the paper studio where I park my car, I'm reminded that I need to get the place in order for me to work there. I'm not avoiding making art by wanting to clean, I'm wanting to make some flat clear physical space the size of my glueboard in order to have a place to make art. I'm feeling stuck because I think of it on my way to and from work, and while I'm at work. In other words, I contemplate this activity when I'm safely time- or space-bound from actually STARTING this project.

Clever me.

No more. Starting tonight, I'm going to FlyLady my studio. Fifteen minutes a night, finding places for all the ephemera and stuff I've collected over the summer, sorting through things that have been sitting ragged and fallow for months uhm, years, tossing dried paints and glues and re-arranging whatever needs to be looked after. I have deadlines at the end of the month for charms and ATC's, I have jam ATC's that have been held up for far far too long, I have communal projects I said I'd do that need to be moved NOW.

So--stuck point identified (for now) and plan of action prepared. Off to implement!