Elise Matthesen

 What with one thing and another, I wound up thinking tonight about my unexpectedly lengthened stay in post-surgical inpatient rehab after my somewhat complicated hip replacement in 2009. (It got complicated more when a bunch of the muscles in that leg decided not to work. Like, went on strike. Days and days. I finally tricked them into working again by imagining I was walking on a sidewalk and saw a stone or bit of downed branch that was in the way for people walking, and at the last minute decided to kick it lightly to get it off the sidewalk. Several days of that and I got a twitch. And eventually it all came back. Sorry, I digress. What am I doing in these parentheses?)

OK, that's better. Whew. 

Anyhow, I was thinking back to the early days in rehab, with only one working leg, and a very large amount of pain even for me, and doing anything was huge effort. They wanted me moving. I wanted me moving too. But I had pretty much no stamina. (The leadup to the surgery involved years of a lot of pain and some diminishment of ability to get around.) 

Somebody did a brilliant thing. I don't remember if it was a PT person or an OT person or one of the nurses, but whoever it was came to me and said they wanted me moving around as much as I could, and I should ask to be transferred to the wheelchair and try things, don't worry about being a bother if you have to ask to go back to bed, just try some stuff and go until you are tired. OK, I said. Then they said, I understand you like music. Very much, I said. Well then, they said, one hundred feet down that hallway in the room on the right is a piano. If you get there, you can play it.

Sneaky buggers. Brilliant sneaky buggers. I was playing it the next day, and from then on, whenever I could.

I had though to buy an electronic keyboard (probably by asking Scott Keever to pick one out for me; he says there are decent ones for about $400 that would do anything I needed them to), but to do that, I'd need to get all the new stuff up in the Etsy shop and then sell a whole bunch of things. And I am slower than I would like this week. And last week.

Guess I know what I'm working on tomorrow, besides essential paperwork and finally making that cabbage apple slaw before the apples are unhappy and the cabbage likewise.

Seven days to birthday actual.  All righty then.


edited because I cannot spell correctly at this hour, apparently. Lioness fall over go zzzzz now.

 So many earrings.

A few days back, I sorted out my Swarovski crystal storage boxes. Since they've discontinued sales of their sparkly, sparkly goodies to us hoi polloi, I no longer need to keep my labeled compartments after they're empty and waiting for restock, because there are not going to be any restocks. So there was a great deal of removing empty compartments. I use a set of stacking cylindrical towers (5 high) that fit in a case (6 towers across), and I had nine cases. The clasp finally gave up on one of the cases, so it was handy to be able compress nine into eight by removing the empties. 

Sorting all those out means that I've updated my knowledge of what I have. It also means that when I was done sorting, there were 113 pairs of earrings ready for posting in my Etsy shop.

Seriously, it's always been true that the fastest way for me to get inspiration is to set out to tidy up the workshop. It works every time. The workshop never gets all the way tidied, but I'm too happy working on new pieces that I'm fine with that.

It may be an aspect of some ADHD superpower. Probably is. Whatever it is, I've learned to use the power for good, at least as far as making new stuff is concerned.

Do you have a place that's hard to tidy up because the inspiration is so thick there?