Grateful for:
Continuously finding various motivations to keep up my writing. Or maybe they are finding me. Especially nice when motivations combine with inspirations like in this blog post about writing and the necessary components for finding the flow.
I have wanted to read and do the Artist’s Way challenge for a while now and the comments in the previously mentioned blog post have motivated me enough to actually give it a go. 3 written pages equal 750 words, my WordPress editor has a word count and I can always use another motivator to keep me writing so here it goes: 30 day writing challenge. I am shifting my “end of day” writing to “first thing in the morning” writing with an added goal of 750 words (in addition to at least 10 things to be grateful for which has been the cornerstone of this blog since the inception). I have also gotten an idea to make my first gratitude item of the day a lesson I have learned that day so those interested in personal development only don’t have to wade through 750 words of things I did, people I talked to and foods I cooked and ate to get to the gems of my self discovery process. Lets see how I can make it happen.
Just solved one problem with morning time writing – getting lost in cyberspace, which i am particularly susceptible too. Solution – WordPress editor full screen button+ Firefox F11 full screen mode + hide toolbars. Now I see nothing else but the editing window. Interesting to catch myself involved in the constant minute life optimization and tweaking process.
Yesterday for all intends and purposes was a major procrastination day. I have a million ways I can procrastinate, most of them involve doing tasks and work that do not lead to any measurable positive result and most of them revolve around tweaking my blog. I guess there is a seed of narcissism in there aside from procrastination. Or perhaps I can frame it as digital creativity – I get lost for hours in tweaking and polishing and css updating and the final result gives me great satisfaction to behold.
I saw a gorgeous sunset last night which was just phenomenal. Photos should appear below automatically if one of my tweaking and optimization and digital creativity projects of including yahoo pipes into WordPress to automatically show Flickr photos taken on the blog post’s day work correctly.
Procrastinating myself completely out of time does have one positive side effect: the work that I was planning on doing myself all of a sudden I am forced to outsource since I leave myself no time to complete it. Now if only I can reverse this process in my head and first outsource, then realize the abundance of time I created and the consciously choose how to best spend it…
Above paragraph seems to qualify for the epiphany of the day, but moving it to the top would mess up the chronological post flow so the next idea is to bold the lesson of the day and to copy it into the exert later.
This process of writing whatever comes to my mind is turning out quite fun but also highlights just how many of my thoughts concern themselves with process…
No post is complete without a mention of something I either cooked or ate. Food is the most used tag in my library and indeed one of my biggest passions. These days I am all about chocolate, having discovered its psychotropic qualities I am cooking, consuming and musing about chocolate all day long. Today I have made Cayenne pepper spiced fruit and nut bars: raw chocolate, coconut oil, Cayenne, cinnamon, vanilla melted together in a bowl on top of boiling water (use thermometer to keep below raw temperature). Originally mixture was intended to cover fruit but it quickly turned into fudge so I added hazelnuts and raisins and transfered into an ice cube tray to freeze as chocolate bars (thank you Naked Chocolate for this and other ideas). I was forced (don’t you hate that? 🙂 to make the mixture again and again it turned into fudge but I did my best to fudge cover the strawberries and mandarin pieces. Not quite the same as the usual choc covered sensation but pretty close. My current theory is that it turns fudgy if left to melt too long, so next time I am going to time and move quickly with my recipe and see what happens.
I got a massage at the end of the day – and yes – with a VERY happy ending 🙂
How fitting, I found this at the end of the day today while cyber surfing. Things that make me go “Hmmm…”
