One of my fifty cent purchases at Saturday's library used book sale was Sunset's book on Crafts for Children. Lately, I feel as though if I am ever to learn more craft-oriented skills, I am going to have to go to the proverbial square one. This book has some cool things--like a hawk kite with soda straws--that are within my limited ken. I wish Texas had a Sunset Magazine, California's wonderful magazine about where to put one's potted plants on one's back patio and such magazine. Its travel articles did novel things like imagine that sometimes one might wish to stay in a hotel room costing less than three hundred dollars--unlike the Los Angeles Times, which seemed to think that every traveller wished to spend his or her retirement savings on a single
five day trip.
I want to use my "new found" time to get more of the little things on my personal to do list done. The cool weather is energizing, somehow. I feel that work demands have put me behind on getting pragmatic day to day stuff done. It would be nice to have that caught up feeling--I don't think I've really had it for months.
I used a leftover birthday gift certificate to get an ambient album by Paul Vnuk, who is one of the two members of the group Ma Ja Le. This is really good stuff--synthy pulsation mixed with the sound of rainfall. I usually am not much for "natural found sound", but this one really works. Lately I've gone back to ambient music listening while I work. It seems very calming somehow. I need to expand my ambient listening list a bit. I'll have to see if I can't track down some more artists to add to my collection.
I'm trying to remember now what sin I committed that led to this morning's bout of insomnia. Did I max out on diet Cokes? Am I worried about the bad news I got last evening? Am I just filled with excess energy? I don't know. But at least the pre-dawn silence is a moment when I can think about anything and nothing, and that's a sort of blessing in itself.
