fun

Drawing for Fun

Well, truth be told, most of the drawing I do is for fun but this is a little different.

A good friend of mine bought us both a copy of Johanna Basford’s 30 Days of Creativity so we could work on it together.

So I get the fun of drawing from prompts AND the fun of working on this at the same time as my friend.

Image description: a page from Basford’s book that shows two shelves filled with vases. Some vases have flowers in them already but there are some that I drew in black ink.

Giving my brain a break

My brain is being a bit of a jerk today so I spent a bit of time listening to an audiobook and drawing and colouring this.

It helped a bit.

A drawing of brightly coloured shapes with thick black outlines
Image description: A drawing of shapes created by thick, black, curved lines that takes up the whole piece of paper. Each shape is coloured with a different bright coloured marker. The shapes are somewhat similar to how beach rocks end up when they wash ashore.

Monday, Monday

I decided to take last Friday and today off so I could have a long weekend and it has been great for my brain (even though the next few paragraphs will make it seem otherwise – bear with me.)

It’s kind of weird though because one part of my brain thinks it is only a day ‘off’ if I am doing absolutely nothing.

Yet, as I have said before, a day with nothing in it is very stressful for me because I spent the whole day subconsciously wondering if I *should* be doing something else.

So, basically my brain is telling me that a real day off is a day doing nothing but if I try to do that, my brain spends the day bugging me about what I’m doing.

Either way, my ends up spending a lot of time asking itself if this ‘counts’ as a day off, if I’m fooling myself, and…you get the drift.

When you couple that with the fact that it is tricky for me to distinguish between my work and my relaxation because my hobbies, my work, and my volunteer work have a lot of elements in common, it makes it even harder to tell if my day off is a day off.

(Especially when you add in the way my brain jumps around and makes connections between things. I could be solving work problems while I am walking the dog or lying in my swing. Not because those problems were on my mind per se but because that’s when the solution floated up.)

So, anyway, that’s where the borrowed phrasing of ‘letting my brain off-leash’ is coming in handy.

I’ve decided that any time in which my brain can be off-leash for the majority of the day counts as a day off.

That gives me nice, broad parameters that are still specific and it doesn’t limit me to specific activities.

And that’s worked out pretty well for me this long weekend.

Ducks!

My sister and I went swimming this morning, in the rain, at a local pond.

Some ducklings had the same plan.

Small ducks swimming in a pond with another duck walking towards the water.
Image description: a photo of some ducks swimming and walking up to get in the water at the shoreline of a pond with a pebbly beach on the right, the water on the left, some trees and greenery at the top of the photo.