Creative Cogitation

It’s been 13 days since I last blogged.  What have I done?  Not much to be per­fectly hon­est.  I went up to Oak Creek again, this time with a raft of peo­ple includ­ing 3 kids.  It was 5 days and a lot of fun (for the most part).  I did enjoy tak­ing the lit­tle ones on this or that adven­ture like hik­ing up Munds Creek or going to the deep hole; it is nice to see the unfil­tered joy of discovery.

After 3 days the enter­tain­ment com­mit­tee started to wear out though.  Kids had to redis­cover the ancient Nin­tendo in the trailer, which was rather amus­ing, the joy of the ring game (kinda like horse­shoes), Yahtzee and other such pas­times.  Most of the adults and one child left on Sun­day after­noon, as they had to work Monday.

I got some paint­ing done but I still haven’t fin­ished any of the paint­ings I dis­cussed in my last blog.  I was really hop­ing to get more done. Silly me.  Les­son learned.  If you plan a retreat that involves non artists, you are not going to get much of a chance to paint.  I am not upset really; I did need a lit­tle sum­mer retreat and tak­ing it in 2 5-day seg­ments is bet­ter than not.  On the other hand part of me is bugged because I did *waste* this time-and I know I shouldn’t be bugged.

A group of chil­dren and adults hunt for craw­dads in Oak Creek AZ. Photo by Jake Beck­man © 2010

When I arrived back in Phoenix I dis­cov­ered my air con­di­tioner had busted again.  This time the com­pres­sor shorted out. $1445 to replace it and the AC/heater we are dis­cussing is about 45 years old.  If I fix the com­pres­sor what else is going to break? It still has sev­eral other ancient parts.  In the mean time I fired up the swamp cooler, which only pro­vides a lit­tle bit of relief as its mon­soon sea­son and the humid­ity means it just does not work well. I unloaded the van and put a few things away, but some things just got put away today-that is so unlike me.  The house is a mess.  I do not want to deal with it.

I got a few bids on new heat pumps.  Holy Cow!  Need­less to say I do not have that kind of cash lying around right now.  That was last Tues­day after­noon.  I ordered a floor unit from Costco, which is sup­posed to be deliv­ered tomorrow. That post­pones the deci­sion about what to about the busted AC indefinitely, I can han­dle that, just as soon as I feel cold air wash­ing over me again. In the mean­time it has been hot and sticky and it is very hard to get moti­vated to do any­thing.  In the heat of the day I feel like tak­ing a nap directly in front of a fan.

In my *spare* time, (ha, ha, ha) I have been work­ing on the tax class website.  The web­site is 40 or cross linked/indexed pages com­plete with Q&A and sam­ple tax returns (there are probably100  pdfs attached to these pages).  The SEE study web­site is actu­ally pretty big. I am updat­ing the infor­ma­tion to cover the 2009 tax year and there are all sorts of lit­tle bits that are spe­cific only to that year that have be located and changed from the pre­vi­ous tax year. I don’t have time to do it.  I am doing this again, why?

The same group I am doing this vol­un­teer work for asked me to take over their web­site to.  I said no.  I said no.  I said no.  I think I said no on the phone for about 3o min­utes.  Finally they heard no.  As for the tax class web, I tend to be a per­son of my word so if I say I am going to do some­thing for some­one else, I gen­er­ally do it, even if I dis­cover I have bit­ten off more than I can chew.  I am not so good at hon­or­ing those promises to myself and as I sit here writ­ing this I rec­og­nize this dis­par­ity is def­i­nitely some­thing I need to address, quickly. I have got to say no a hell of a lot more often.

So the short ver­sion is I got back, melted, did my day job, shopped for AC options, met with at least 4 HVAC guys, and have been forc­ing myself to work in the *rain for­est,* which is what I am call­ing my office right now and have not really painted in about 2 weeks.  The 100 paint­ing thing has been on hia­tus for 2 weeks and it doesn’t look like I am going to have time to pick up the thread this week either.

I have to make the bleep­ing time.  More later.

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

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