Unintentional Hiatus and The Current State of Things

Well...it's been two weeks since I posted, and that's just too dang long!

I didn't intend to have this temporary hiatus at all...life just throws craziness at you sometimes, you know?  Or sometimes my personal craziness throws itself center stage in my life...maybe that's a better way to say it...

I was so excited for the long weekend for July 4th...and then when it happened, I found myself in a blue funk.  I don't know why, I don't know where it came from...things had been going so well...but then...BLAMO!  Horrible melancholy.

And you can see the funk in my art.  Here are my Documented Life Project spreads for the last two weeks and Journal 52 piece for last week (the J52 spread for two weeks ago is in the last post):

"How much time have I spent looking for something that I seem to know I'll never find?"

The prompt for this one was to use a crossword, sudoku, or word search in your art, and you can see in the picture that I used a word search as the background (of all the surfaces) in this spread.

I call him a Pega-corn (cross between a Pegasus and a Unicorn)...because Uni-sus doesn't sound very cool.
I think my Pega-corn has a nice butt...I strongly admire the butt...

I couldn't think of anything at all to do for this prompt, because of the blue funk, so I just started smearing paint with a credit card.  

Poor, sad little dude...

When the paint dried, I saw the basic shape for the sad little dude above, so he was where I started...after that, I saw the Pega-corn...and then the rest...

"I suppose I love this world in spite of my clenched fists."
I think the guy on the right looks like he's going to punch the flame-y dancer in the face...I don't know what the flame-y dancer did to deserve it, but here we are...

And the journaling popped into my head, in part because of the word search, and in part because of finding the shapes in the paint, and in part because of the idea of looking for things that are make believe, but mostly because I was in a blue funk and couldn't think of any thing happy to write...

I am a fan of this mermaid, because she is chunky and has saggy boobs like me...we get sick of all those famous mermaids and their perky boobs!  Plus, I think her tail looks sassy...like she's walking the plus size mermaid catwalk...

The blue funk continued for the Journal 52 prompt of Nostalgia:

"I always thought I would look back at my tears and laugh,
but I never thought I would look back at my laughter and cry."
-Cat Stevens

The color scheme is nostalgic/retro to me: red and robin egg blue.  And the quote...I think Nostalgia should be good thoughts...but my blue funk had other ideas, and I saw that quote on Pinterest and went with it...

By the time the next DLP prompt, to use a tiny picture, came up, I was getting pretty darn sick of being sad:

"I am tired of being so very sad."

But the fact that I was tired of it did not stop the funk from existing.

So I started doing the Summer of Color challenges that I agreed to partake in, but ended up being severely behind:

"You can't add apples and oranges."
Sorry for the blurry photo...
Week 1 colors: Aqua, Yellow, and a smidgen of Hot Pink

The apples and oranges page is probably the most boring page I've made (at least in my eyes) in a long time...but the thought behind it was a reminder that some things just don't work together, no matter how much you try to force it.  ...like my plan to get out of the funk, which has been unsuccessful thus far (at the time of the page, that is...)

"Lost in space"
Week 2, Coral, Teal, and a pop of Bright White
The coral isn't coming across so coral-y in this picture, but I assure you, it's very coral-y indeed.

I don't know why it is, that when I feel depressed, the tendency is to isolate myself...when what I really need is to be around people.  Even though I know that to be true, my blue funk was telling me to stay at home and be a sad, lonely wiener...even to the point of neglecting the blog and my online art friends, which/whom I love very much!  At the point of the above art journal page, I was feeling very cut-off from everything.  I think it's easy to forget when you are in a blue funk, that other people have blue funks too, and so you are not alone in your struggle against the funk.

"Kiss me so I remember how." -Gregory Alan Isakov "Astronaut
Week 3, Lavender, Gray, and a smudge of Plum
I couldn't find a Lavender paint, so I used a color called "Orchid" which is like a grayed out Lavender...I think it added to the sadness of the page...

The journaling on the above page was taken from this song:

That bald gal looks so sad to me...she is having a blue funk too, I guess.  I really like that song (and Gregory Alan Isakov's music in general) and I've been wanting to use that line for a really long time...but the page had to be right, and that bald gal appeared and she turned out to be just right...because to me she looks sad, but also like she's questioning something...like she's looking for comfort...and to me, that's what the lyrics suggest too...

"There is a fine line between genius and crazy...I like to use that line as a jump rope!"
Week 4, Pink, Apple Green, and a splash of Dark Green
I saw that girl on Pinterest, but the link only goes to a picture, not a site (See the original here).  I loved her so much that I pretty much blatantly copied her as well as I could.  I wish I knew who the artist is, so that I could see more of their work, because I do love the girl!

So, as you can might guess from the journal page above, the blue funk cloud did eventually lift.  Thanks to a ground hog...

Over the weekend, I was walking to the house from my car, saw 'something' move, and yelled "HOLY CRAP!" because it startled me.  My husband (who is, shall we say, not a fan of wild life) heard me and came to the door to see why I hollered.  I pointed and said "Look, it's a ground hog.'  At which point my husband sees the ground hog and shuts the screen door, holding the handle securely, effectively locking me out of the house, and says: "GET RID OF IT!  GET RID OF IT!  IT COULD HAVE RABIES!!!"  (I wish I was joking...but it gets better...)  So I go grab a hoe out of the shed, to shoo the ground hog with.  To which my husband shouts (through the screen door) "DON'T KILL IT!"...which I was not going to do...he just put it in my head that the ground hog might be rabid, and I wanted some way to defend myself against the theoretically rabid ground hog in case it turned on me while I was shooing it off the porch.  

So, ground hogs either have bad eye sight, are really stupid, or, in this case, genuinely rabid...because I had to gently bonk the ground hog in the nose with the hoe to get it to move off the porch...  It proceeds to run around the house and get on the other porch...the one my husband enters and exits the house by...so you know it couldn't stay there either...at least not according to my husband, who tells me to shoo it off that porch (still from the 'safety' of the indoors, of course).  So I successfully shoo it off that porch, at which point the ground hog runs under my husband's car.  

And my husband insists that I can't leave it there either, because it's rabid and he will come out of the house to go to work and the ground hog will bite his ankle when he goes to get in the car and he (the husband) will then die from rabies.  So I spend the next 30 minutes trying to shoo the ground hog out from under the car, by using the hoe to slowly scoot him.

At last I was successful at getting him out from under the car, and he started scurrying down the road, with me chasing him, hoe still in hand, hollering "Go!  Get out of here!  Get!"

As I am chasing the ground hog down the road, (slowly, for I am a chunky gal) he stops every 10-15 feet and looks back at me, as though he can't believe what he's seeing.  Three times!  Finally, I'm so frustrated I just yell "GO IN THE WOODS!!!"  I kid you not, the ground hog then runs into the woods.  I couldn't make this crap up!

I thought of a few things in that moment:

1.   I'm really happy I don't have close neighbors...because I wouldn't want anyone else to have witnessed  this little adventure with their own eyes...
2.  My husband is willing to sacrifice me to save himself. (This time it was a ground hog...what if it's a bear next time?!?)
3. Ground hogs don't run very fast, and apparently, neither do I.  Which is why I'm glad there were no neighbors to see me losing the race against the ground hog...
4.  I am pretty sure that, to the groundhog, I looked like a tribe of cannibals in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, that when Bugs escaped, stood at the edge of their island angrily shaking their spears above their heads and yelling cannibal gibberish...the only difference is that I was holding a hoe, not a spear and yelling Hillbilly gibberish...
5. What would have happened if I would have just yelled "GO INTO THE WOODS" at the ground hog in the first place?

The positive thing about that whole experience is that it was so comical that the haze of blue funk lifted...and I made the pink and green page, commemorating the fact that I am probably a genius and/or insane...but in a battle of wits with a ground hog, I will eventually come out victorious.

"On bad days, when you want to hide yourself from the world, remember that there's always someone out there longing to see your glorious face.  Try to never waste the love in their eyes."
Week 5, Red, Royal Blue, and a pop of Light Blue
My take on Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf...my Wolf loves Red...

The Red and Wolf spread is to remind me that instead of isolating myself when I feel sad, I need to remember that people care about me...and that being around others will help me to flee the funk.  Even if those "others" end up being a ground hog that let me bonk it on the nose and have a comedic adventure just to get me to feel better!  How could I be sad after that?!?

I'm going into this week feeling better than I have been, and working to keep that up!  No more blue funks allowed for a while...life's too short for too many blue funks!