I was doing #Collage365 – a collage a day for a year – before this project, but the projects overlapped by 18 days. That means today marks 700 days on the trot on which I have created an artwork due to my self-imposed commitments. I have not had a day off for 700 days!
Anyway, earlier this evening I was saying to Sally, my partner, that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do for today’s piece. Then jokingly I said, “perhaps I’ll do the same as yesterday.” It’s not such a bad idea, especially since in the last 4 days I will be very busy installing the show! It would be good to settle on an idea and just do a new version of it every day – or not!
I have just spent the last hour or two trying to track down the sudden slow running of my PC. It’s a pretty powerful machine and it is not often that I have cause to complain at its speed and capability even when editing multiple large images. I quickly found that none of the processes were using much CPU power so I looked at the services and found something using 25%! It turned out to be the monitoring system for my UPS. I updated the software and immediately the problem went away. But of course while looking under the hood I happened to notice a couple of other things using more than they should. Of course I have no clue what most of these things are and what they do so I end up reading forum posts and trying to track down why these things are misbehaving. They are not affecting the system enough to slow it up or cause me any problem at all and yet I am spending an hour or two trying to get a solution when I should be writing this and a hundred other things. But of course it is because I have a brain that does that kind of obsessive hunting that I have taken on #Letter365 and am carrying it out in this way!
Which brings me to the fact that I have not had a day off for almost 2 years! I think it is now 672 consecutive days that I have created a piece for either #Collage365 or #Letter365 and for a few weeks both. Most of the time it’s fine, usually more than fine, but occasionally I wish I could cheat. Like tomorrow we are going to be away and I don’t want to do my #Letter365 there so I will have to do it in the morning and I may end up restricted by time and may not have the full range of materials open to me because of drying time, say, or getting-it-wrong-a-few-times time, or run-out-of-ideas time. How great would it be if I had already created tomorrow’s artwork? But of course that goes against the whole idea of the project. However, that reminds me, there is nothing to stop me at least doing my envelope in advance.
An unfolding artwork created a piece each day for a year