Cortisone to the Right Side of the Brain

Today I shall blog!

This morning, I got cortisone shots in both knees. It hurt just a little but I hollered A LOT and carried on and grimaced and oh.my.heavens.the.PAIN so I'm using it as an excuse to sit down on the job.  I have new stuff to hang on the shop walls but I'm exhausted  from the overuse of my Drama Gland at the doctor's office.  So today I'll stay off the ladder and I shall blog.

I haven't written a blog entry for a couple of years. I like to write, but I seem to take a long time:  I write, I edit, I decide it's stupid, I go back, I change a word, I fiddle with the pictures, I abandon it and forget it for a long while. I'm hypercritical. Same reason I quit drawing. It stopped being fun.

Then yesterday,  I got a catalog in the mail with this greeting card in it:

This is me all over. It was a shock to see it in writing. Tony and I have noticed lately that as we age, we're more cautious about lots of things: there's been a lot of waffling at our house lately

about little things (paint the kitchen walls?) and big things (tear down the kitchen walls?)... and I don't particularly care for indecisiveness, especially my own.  It's a combination of fear and laziness.   So I'm making a conscious effort to cure myself.  And part of that means writing and drawing again, just for the fun of it.

And here's a good place to get a kick-start.

Sometimes the hardest thing about being creative is finding something worth writing about or drawing. And there's the mistake.  It doesn't have to be worth something when you're doing it for fun.  And these books are fun: each page gets you started with a hint -- draw platform shoes. draw a mustache on this face. Here's one I did from the book "642 Things to Draw":

I was supposed to be drawing a waterslide.  It actually looks more like a girl sliding down part of the lower intestine on a striped towel, but I had fun drawing it, and that's what counts.  It loosened me up, and when I put the pen to paper (no fair using pencil!), it reminded me of the time when Tony and I got our raft stuck inside a tunnel at the water park because my butt was too big to slide through it and a truck-sized person in a pink bikini rear-ended us... but that's a story (and a funny drawing) for another time.  The point is that one thing leads to another, and before you know it, you've got a whole slew of ideas running through your brain.

We just have to start. I just have to start.

And having this studio built behind the house would surely help me get started.  (Tony, are you reading this?)

Now you please tell me: 

How do YOU jump-start your creativity?