Something

O spider I see in the vanity sink,
they say that you've been there two days.
I think you should probably find your way out
or someone will flush you away.

I 'spose if the sides are too steep for escape
You're likely in need of some help.
Yeah, I'll grab a cup and then scoot you up top,
but next time please do this yourself.

 NO, I HAVE NOT LOST MY MIND. It's just Bad Poetry Day. And apparently copyrighted for profit, according to that link. Kinda figures, doesn't it? And yes, I wrote a poem about a spider (which I really did save this morning, to no one's surprise who's ever read this blog. It was a European House Spider. How sad is it that I knew the scientific name without even looking it up? Anyway, I let it go so that it could keep eating things in the basement. Incidentally, I do understand if people are creeped out by this particular species. Long legs, very scurry-y... they're harmless, though. Um -- what was I saying before I started on this?) and accompanied it with picture of fish. It wouldn't have been pointless otherwise, would it?

Just for fun, I put a modified version of the first line of my bad poem through this poetry generator a few times and got this:

Spider in the bathroom sink
While I sit all alone singin the blues........
though i never knew what was in the flue.
Grey souls, Grey shoes I've even got grey blues.

Deep, man. Deep.

I actually have been a bit of a poetry writer over the years, but this is the first one I've written in I don't know how long. It's like most of my hobbies, really. I'll go totally gangbusters on something (poetry, knitting, needlework, I-bet-some-of-you-are-expecting-me-to-say-doodling-but-I've-never-really-given-that-up) for a while -- sometimes years -- and then completely drop it for sometimes years. I'm pretty cyclical, though. Hobbies never seem to totally go away, and the return is easily triggered. Say a person (ok, me) hasn't knitted for a while, and then notices that the homemade dish cloth is getting ratty. Well, you take out the cotton yarn and the needles and you whip up a quick dish cloth. Then you think about the fact that you haven't made a new toque for a while and get out the patterns. Then you find yourself frequenting the yarn aisle looking for something that would do for a fuzzy but not too fuzzy throw...

And then you get tired of knitting and remember that you probably still have some embossing paper hanging around here somewhere.

I'm a natural born dabbler, I guess. It's good for my job, though. I can do a little bit of a lot of things, and when you're trying to think of programming ideas that can be handy.

Anyway, lunch time now. If you're at all interested in my poems from back when I was regularly writing (some good, some ok, some definitely a good fit for Bad Poetry Day) there's a few at this link from the other blog. And just for fun, here's a last word from the poetry generator. First line's mine. The rest? The universe, I suppose:

Cows, cows
End this charade now, disguise not your battered soul.
I see her now!!!! 
The shock of never rips through my soul.

Revisiting

I've been thinking that I need to get out the modelling clay again.

I went to post my doodle for this week's Illustration Friday prompt on the other blog (not really much of a work of art this time, since I was just playing), and one of the suggested links at the bottom of the post led me to one of my old modelling clay men submissions. Back when I was making an effort to post every week -- which I should probably get back to -- I didn't always feel like drawing. On those days I'd make little men out of modelling clay and put them in various situations that fitted the prompt. Hang on... here's some of them. Weird, but fun. I'm not sure why I stopped doing it. I even have fresh modelling clay, if I'm not mistaken.

I tend to be like that with hobbies. I'm a serial hobbyist. I'll go great guns at something for a while, then I'll drop it almost completely and move on to something else. Needlework moves to knitting moves to poetry moves to sketching, and so on and so on. That's not to say that I never come back to anything. Doodling's been with me for years, for example. It's just that sometimes I get more serious about it for a while, and then I back off a bit. Same thing goes for photography, although for a different reason (a different reason than the NO reason for the other stuff. Good one, Dee). I loved to take pictures as a kid, but as I've said before things slowed down a lot when I was expected to pay for my own film and processing. I still took photos; I just didn't really experiment with them at all. The advent of affordable digital, of course, changed all that. I take a stupid amount of photos now. Occasionally of very stupid things, even. It's great.

It's also great to come back to a hobby after you haven't done much with it for a while. It's fresh again, but at the same time you remember why you enjoyed it in the first place. I can always tell when a hobby's ready to be rebooted because it'll start nagging at the back of my mind. Anything can set it off. Putting on an old toque, for instance, and realising how many years ago I knitted it. That'll get me thinking about the other neat toque patterns that I have that haven't been tried yet, and that in turn gets me checking my yarn stocks "just out of curiosity", and once that happens you just know I'll be knitting another toque soon because I won't stop thinking about it.

In other words, yeah, I've been thinking about knitting a new toque or two for next winter.

Notice that I say next winter?

After the past couple of weeks of lows in the -20s and windchills in the -30s, yesterday was finally above 0C. It's supposed to be above 0C all week, actually. I'm living in quiet hope that spring might find us sometime before August.

In the meantime, though, I took the picture to the left yesterday. The melt has a long, long way to go.

This has been such a strange, strange year.

Anyway, I've distracted myself.

I suppose it's as good a time as any to wrap this up, then. In the world of rotating hobbies most things come back, is all I was really saying. Knitting will come back (probably soon), poetry will come back (because I don't seem to be able to stop it. My poetry ain't great, folks), playing the piano will come back (eventually), photography and doodling will never go away, and prepare for the return of the Little Modelling Clay Men because they're pretty much in my brain all the time anyway.

It's an odd brain.

See you in a day or two, all.