Ideally…

… Ideally, I wouldn’t be needing to summarise a duplicate post… (updating 15/08/15)

I don’t usually post photos of myself (you can see why!), so in spite of the familiar setting, i.e. propped on my bed (AKA the office) with my cuddly carer, known as Mixt-ape, I am so very out of my comfort zone by making such an appearance in the wider wide world public.

It had already been a busy day, making and posting today’s sketches, phone calls, lunch, and we were both exhausted …

…

The only trouble with eating after the pubs close is having to wait for your food to settle in your stomach before you can sleep, by which time you may just be wide awake again. Moreso if you think to just snatch half an hour to finish a quick post! The trouble with writing a sentence like the first of this paragraph is that the reader may well assume you went to the pub!

I need to learn how to do things like embed tweets or music or anything to bring some enlivening interesting content to my page… but finding stuff can be so distracting and draining. I don’t go to most of that sort of stuff when reading other blogs, I just glance over it. Why should I assume any reader has time to do anything than flit by here and there? Maybe I’m just old, out of fashion and not with trending enough. I’m definitely being a slow learner with blogging technology!

I’ve still no idea about ‘the ideal reader’ and still don’t believe in that ideal.

Oh well, I’ve made some progress: I kept up with non-admin tasks this week like browsing other blogs and exploring tags in the reader and met some co-learners via their blogs. Now I changed my blog title however temporary it might be and added a tagline of a sort here at last. I nailed my brief intro post via the magic of blogging time travel. I’ll leave learning embedding stuff for weekend homework, along with flitting through potential themes for the next overdue improvement – a change is as good as a rest? I do hope so!

(Mixt-ape was ‘born’ at my other blog, One for Fun… and now prefers his new home at Fishing4soup.)

Pocket Watch 2

I’ve not used a watch in years. There are no clocks in my home – at least none that work or are visible. (Like anything else ‘useless’ they get kept in case I can afford a battery or in case I want to draw them ONE day!)

Previously clocks and watches were made that required a person to wind them up daily to keep time. No battery needed. Somehow the idea took hold that labour-saving was essential and it’s too much effort for most people to wind a watch or clock – plus battery production and sales were essential for job creation and manufacturing industry sustainability – so much less availability of the wind-up variety. ‘Times change, not always for the better’.

Time is told by listening to radio, my computer display or mostly by my mobile phone. Or those failing I guess roughly by daylight/darkness, where the sun or moon is – or just don’t care and wait and see.

Until I upgraded my mobile phone very recently my old Blackberry handset was mostly only used for telling the time. It was hopeless for internet use, wouldn’t stream video or run apps, managed to send and receive texts but quite dodgy for sustaining phone conversation. My latest phone handles all kinds of content and works like a dream even if I don’t use those capabilities to WATCH stuff as if it’s a handheld TV. The mobile phone is the new pocket watch in both these ways.

‘Time is Money’?

If I’d picked another pocket…

…that came out wrong! no-one wants that kind of Time!

What I meant, of course, was had I selected another of my own pockets, in my old winter coat or one of my bags, the only contents would be ‘found objects’. Any small coinage wouldn’t be my money, it’d be picked up off the pavement along the way during my very occasional trips out of the house, along with ring pulls, rusty nuts, bolts and nails, all kinds of small, discarded detritus that I just can’t resist picking up and bringing home because…? I

was planning to do a ‘pocket watch’ still life drawing, but having arranged my pocket contents to draw wondered why not just hit a button and grab a snap instead.

Maybe another time I’ll go for different pocket and draw its contents, maybe I won’t…

another response to

click pic to visit Shafali’s Creativity Carnival challenge page

Passages of Time

I’d considered drawing on one or two passages from this ‘Treasury of World Masterpieces’ for a Creativity Carnival response…

… I decided to just take a photo and save time!

For one thing this book cover says WORLD masterpieces (of quotations and proverbs) but it MEANS Western hierarchial world in the main.

I was thinking around history and notions of heritage, culture and tradition when considering the Pocket Watch picture prompt for this week’s Creativity Carnival.

Antiquity and artefacts, aristocracy and atrocities… the background in Shafali’s picture prompt is desolate, barren, there’s no sign of life. The pocket watch glass is broken. Has time stopped?

My ‘thinking’ has been spinning off on tangents and left me way behind as you can probably see 🙂

One particular cultural tradition that could perhaps suggested by the pocket watch prompt pic is the (english?) custom of afternoon tea around four o’clock – scones apparently being a favourite often with jam or cream.

I maybe had something else I planned to write with this but I was burning the candle at both ends again and drafting in bed on my mobile phone when I should’ve been sleeping. SO I’ve come back to do links etc. Maybe I’ll remember what I intended to write to go with these pics, because I’m fairly sure it wasn’t what i’ve just read back of what I’ve written here so far! Never mind!

I might have baked those scones, having ingredients, but instead ordered a value pack with my internet shopping. I might have sketched them, but again, cheated time and took a quick pic. That’s a paper cup* because these were placed on my bed and also then suggesting how ‘in our times’ disposability is customary – although at a nice english tea parlour you would likely find no such thing. how english IS tea really and why does everything have to be so Western-centric? (*photocopy of my 4th August sketch for #DrawingAugust – the pocket notebook as a paper cup didn’t work as well!)

I’d been thinking, during my #DrawingAugust participation how lovely it would be to get up and go sketching, take a picnic lunch, stop off for tea and cake, have a nice afternoon out – so I did, just indoors, at home!

Perhaps what I meant to write about was all the sayings or phrases we have about time, how many can you think of off the top of your head? Plenty, I’d bet. How many good quotes could potentially found on the internet rather than in an old book? Obsolescence was another thing I’d been pondering, along with ignorance (mine!). How ‘old’ is the pocket watch? Who invented it, where? Also, what do we mean by ‘timeless quality’ (of art, story, film, music etc)?

Timeliness! I need some of that! And why do we say ‘Old Father Time’ – should it be ‘old farther time’? Is it like so much of our (poor majority) hand-me-down heritage, a corrupted phrase, intellectualised and embellished? Another blogger participating in the challenge, Aidyl93 asked, at the end of her post, ‘what would we do without time?’ – I’d say we’d maybe have far more patience and better understanding of people not noticing how fast time passes or forgetting(!) – ‘meet me with the next new moon’ or ‘tomorrow when the sun’s high…’ Time is a human construct after all, with little relativity to the natural world/universe – isn’t it?

This post was botched in response to Shafali’s Creativity Carnival picture prompt. (Visit other much better participant responses, add your own, follow the Creativity Carnival tag in tag reader to fetch most new posts – new challenge announced Friday :D)