Wednesday, June 17, 2009

My Life in 30 Days

I owe it to my friend Kay Dixon for encouraging a swap with 5 people called Thirty Days. We were supposed to find a suitable journal and write and/or illustrate 30 things we didn't want to forget. Then we would do a round robin and send our books around to each other until we all had a chance to read through each others lives.

I had a real hard time trying to pick just 30 things to enshrine in this book. I'm a deep thinker and started more than once to make a list. Parents, childhood, teen years, marriage, parenting, weddings, grandchildren... I couldn't just pick out thirty, so I did what I do best, I procrastinated.

Although the journal was always on my mind, I could not get my thoughts together enough to satisfy myself. I started with 2-3 stories, but I still couldn't get into it. The last thing I wanted in a book was stark white pages filled with just words. This isn't how I saw my life. Then one day Kay let me off the hook. She said make it what pleased me. Put some art in it. It didn't have to be longhand, it didn't have to be in any kind of order, it could be typed. That took the heat off me and she also gave us an extension in time.

Here's the front of the book so far. There's room for more when I find the right thing.


After I got going on the cover I started to do what I really like to do and collaged the next couple pages and then made an introductory page with my picture on it.



From here on the collages and entries are about my childhood, trials and errors in trying new art techniques, and using interesting pictures I have had in my files for years. I thought this would be a good place to bring them out and save them.

















This is the inside back cover that is not finished.

This is the back cover:


I have mailed my book to the first person and when he is finished looking through it it will go to 3 others before I get it back. I'm already setting things aside that I want to add to it when it comes home. I'm anxious to see what the other four books look like. I'm going to be like a dry sponge ready to soak up a lot of new ideas.

Marco - "Prolo"

This time of year it is easy to hear kids in pools yelling Marco - and the familiar echo - Polo! But for me I started crying out for some Prolo Therapy. It's an interesting non evasive way to tighten up loose ligaments by injecting a glucose solution in the ligaments. The ligaments become irritated and tells the brain it needs new tissue. Voila! In 8 weeks or so, I will walk straighter and have more stability in my knees and low back.

After getting about 30 injections in my low back and both knees, I took three weeks off work. Some days I could actually feel exactly where the "mending" was taking place. I took a lot of pain pills and spent a lot of time napping, but now I've reduced the use of those pills and am heading back to work.

Ahhh. I love my regular, normal, sometimes interesting life and am looking forward to some mobility without pain or drugs.