Avoiding the unavoidable

Don't panic, I haven't turned into a super blogger who writes long, important and correctly spelled posts every other day. I am simply avoiding doing something that needs to be done by doing absolutely everything else but that task. I do this all the time and I'm fully aware of what I'm doing and I don't like that I do it but I do it anyway. Is anyone trackin' with me or am I all alone out here?

The sad thing is that I'm not avoiding a root canal or anything like that. I simply need to pick up my beads and junk that I have spread out all over my art room/guest room and put clean sheets on the bed in there for Taylor's house guest who will be here tomorrow. It will probably take me less than 30 minutes to get it done...if I can ever get started.

I am fortunate to have an extra room where I can store all my art supplies and crafty doodads but when I get into a creative frenzy like I'm in right now, I tend to completely trash the whole room which is a slight problem on that rare occasion when that room needs to serve as a guest room.

When we were getting ready to move here from North Texas, the company Jayson works for sent a moving van to our house to pack up all our stuff and haul it here. That was a very cool thing since it saved us a lot of time and work and expense. There were some things we didn't want the movers handling so we packed that stuff up ourselves but for the most part we let them handle it.

The movers were 3 Hispanic guys from some moving company in Houston, which was odd since we weren't moving to or from Houston but we weren't paying for it either so they could have been from Mars for all we cared. Only one of the guys spoke English which ended up making things pretty darn entertaining. These were experienced movers, they knew what they were doing so they really didn't require much from us. One thing the supervisor guy (the one who spoke English) asked was how I wanted the boxes labeled from my art/guest room there. I told him to just label them 'art room' and that would work since they'd be going into another art room after the move.

We got all moved (and not one single thing got broken or lost) and when we began the process of unpacking all the boxes, I saw that the boxes in the art room had been labeled "Arte Room". For a while we referred to the art room as our son, Arte's room. Taylor had some peacock feathers in her room that the movers had carefully rolled up in some heavy padded paper and they labeled it "Girl's Room--Chicken Hair". We got a lot of mileage out of Taylor's chicken hair.

It might not be so bad if all I had to do was straighten up the art room but really "art room" is a misnomer. It's more of an art storage room since I don't actually do any art in that room.  I just store my art stuff in the 2 big closets in there.  The lighting, flooring and available space are just not conducive to a studio environment so I get what I need from the art room and drag it all over the house to work on it. Picking up the stuff I have strewn out all over the rest of the house is the task I will be avoiding after I get through avoiding this one.  I really don't need to put everything away, I just need to confine it to one area so we can at least appear to live like normal human beings, which I'm sure our guest will appreciate.

BEFORE

AFTER

Since I still need to be able to get to all my little jewelry making supplies but I can't keep them spread out all over the guest bed and dining table, I decided to clean up a couple of printers tray/shadow box thingies that someone gave me a while back. I think I got these from Lacey Herbstler but I wouldn't swear to it. They've been tucked away for probably a year just waiting for me to decided what to do with them. They were pitiful little trays but they had potential so I held on to them. Since I'm in avoidance mode and didn't have unlimited free time to work on these, I decided to give them a quick sprucing up with some Old English scratch remover stuff.  It worked great. The dry wood soaked it right up making it look like I had stained them but I didn't.  I love the way they turned out.  I wanted them to still look sort of rough, not all sanded, finished and polished.  There's a drip on one of them that looks just like bird pooh but it's not. I checked. I think it's a paint drip. Apparently at some point someone was painting something in a lovely shade of bird pooh.

WITH GOODIES

Have you ever noticed how when you say you will never, ever in a million years do something, that's the one thing you are guaranteed to end up doing? Most mothers probably think that most boys are not good enough for their daughters and most of the time they're probably right. That was the case with my mother but she took it to another level by doing everything she could to dehumanize the poor, unfortunate young men who had the bad luck to catch her daughters' eye. Any time my sister or I would start talking about a boy, our mom would never refer to him by his name. She acted like he was so insignificant that it wasn't even worth her time to learn his name. They were all called Whatshisface or THAT boy and make no mistake about it...she called them that to their face. Boys were never afraid of our 6'4" dad, but our mother was legendary scary. I swore I would never be that kind of mother and I really don't think I am but lately I've caught myself slipping a little. Take for instance Taylor's house guest. He has a name, I know his name, but I keep calling him House Guest. Since this seems to be the result of some kind of deep psychological scarring, I'm concerned about my ability to not call him House Guest once he gets here. What will happen if he gets here and I say, "hi House Guest, it's nice to meet you"? What if he goes to church with us on Sunday and I introduce him as Taylor's House Guest and never even mention his real name? What if he's reading this and starts making frantic calls to the airline to get his ticket refunded before it's too late?  Taylor would shoot me.  My name would be mud. Or THAT mother.