Tuesday in the wee hours

Well it is after midnight here. I haven't been to bed yet. I took a late nap so haven't been sleepy. I spent the day cleaning out a closet and rearranging stuff from it. I still have a few things to put back. I am trying to discard as much as possible. That is easier said than done.

Usually in a family there is one person who is a packrat and one who isn't. Well we are both packrats. We save way too much stuff thinking that as soon as it is gone, we might need it.

I used to discard things and give them to my mom. A few months later I would be going thru some of her stuff and find what I had discarded. Well it never failed that some of the items would come back home. I learned a lesson. Now I give everything to the Goodwill or donate to our church for their yearly parking lot sale called a Junkatique. It goes to a good cause as they make quite a lot of money that day and a half and every penny goes to missions work.

The puppy has decided she can go "big potty" in the house. I take her outside several times in the evening after she has her night meal. But she just plays and wanders. About midnight the last two nights, she came in and started pestering me. I decided she must have to go out. Well she had, in but not out. I scold her and she understands she is in trouble but it doesn't phase her not to repeat. Now I have two problems to deal with. That and her chewing. I can't seem to find a remedy for either.

I notice that the scavenger hunt is almost at a standstill this week. So is the general sketchbook thread. I saw a newer site that said "back by popular demand" a monthly sketchbook thread. Two or three people who have posted in there said they were too slow for the scavenger hunts. So I guess they don't want to participate. With the lack of response this week, I think many have gotten bored with it. Too bad as it was a very good way to keep practice.

I will continue to do my own. I will keep making lists and doing the sketches for the lists. It is one way that I can keep myself busy without having to sit and figure out what I will sketch next. And I like making lists. Just hope I don't run out of ideas. I have several pages worth already. I will just ask hubby to suggest some things in need be. And I have only been thru a couple of colors. Like draw something red that is on the current hunt.

Making lists for the hunt is no different than what I do to keep me writing. I collect writing prompts. If I get stuck for an idea, I just pull out a prompt and write about what is on the paper. I have hundreds individually in a jar and more listed in notebooks. I found as I was printing them out and cutting them up for the jar, that each time I looked at one of the items, I would think of a memory or a story about that item from my life. The prompts just keep the writing juices flowing.

I write poetry too but have never found a way of having prompts for that. It is a very different type of ability. It just seems to flw right out of me. I will be driving to church, sitting somewhere, or in bed and a sentence or two will pop into my head. Then I start thinking of "like" thoughts and trying to rhyme them. Eventually I have a poem. The thing that amazes me is how I will just keep writing and writing and will end up with a 3-page poem.

The ability to write poetry is a fairly new one. A friend online sent me his poetry site. And I just started writing too. I had worked at a job for 10 years and when I quit and took an offered packet, I started writing poetry. I don't know where it came from and sometimes when I go back and read it, don't even realize it is mine until I see my name there. Some of them I don't remember writing at all.

Here are my latest scavenger hunt items.