Hey All!

I’ve been kinda in my own head lately. I don’t know if I would call it a creative block per se, but I did find that when I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out “what people would want to buy”, instead of drawing what made me happy, and making things that make me happy… so it just kind of made me want to just go play a video game instead. Terra Nil is a nice game btw.

So I’ve spent most of this week trying to figure out ‘how to be more consistent’ with my art, well, with everything really. I’ve picked up stuff thru the years on how to make a habit and some stick, others don’t. I know that I tend to try to ‘fix’ everything all at once, get bored of tracking it all, and then just go back to whatever I was doing before. heh.

But some things have stuck over the years, and I started to wonder why. Two things come to mind… Duolingo and Dishes. Duolingo keeps track of my streak, but also lets me purchase a freeze, so if I’m just not feeling it, I can skip a day but still keep my streak going. I had a really good streak going, for years, in fact, but life happened and I needed a break from everything. Now that we are in a new place, I’m trying to get back to better habits.

So back to Duolingo, I started back up and my streak is currently 186 days (with several freezes during the move, and an occasional weekend off). The thing that helps me remember to do Duo is a trigger… for me it’s eating breakfast at my desk… if I eat breakfast anywhere else, I forget to do Duo. I know what your thinking, why don’t you set a reminder?… oh I have a daily reminder… but I tell myself I’ll get to it in a sec… and then I forget. Anyway, I think the trigger is why I remember to do Duo.

And it’s similar with the Dishes… ok… confession time. I drink A LOT of hot green tea… I mean A LOT… so much so, that I bought a Zojirushi water heater back in 2012… I’ve repurchased two more over the years… it was and still is one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. Anyway, since the water is already hot, I just need the 3 minutes of steeping time to make tea… so at some point I started playing a game of ‘how much can I do in 3 minutes’… and now the kitchen gets touched several times a day and by the end of the day I just have our tea cups to add to the dishwasher. Tada! Dishes are already done!

So… this has been on my mind this week… streaks and triggers… how can I do this for the other things in my life that I want to have better habits for?

So I made this today…

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It’s probably too many things to keep up with, and who knows if I’ll get bored of keeping track of it… but I thought I’d give a go. Also I haven’t come up with any triggers for this stuff yet. But you have to start somewhere… and they say the first step is the hardest. So I showed up and I tried… that’s step one.

Next month is Inktober, blogging daily is always hard… I wonder if I start blogging nearly daily early and if I could make a habit of it now, will it be easier next month? It’s worth a try.

Yesterday, I wanted to draw, but didn’t know what to draw, so I did the blob exercise and came up with some cute drawings. It was fun to just be silly.

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Ok, that’s it for now… hopefully I’ll see you tomorrow?

Until next time…

~nic

P.S. Oh I almost forgot, we saw a roadrunner a few weeks back and have been on the lookout for them again. I saw them today! I had my camera near the window so that I could grab a photo…