A diary of gratitude

What are your daily habits?

For 323 days now

Book 3!

I started this last year. It was recommended as a way of bringing more positive thoughts to my mind. I have done it for 323 days now and there’s no sign of me stopping. I’m most of the way through my third sketchbook. I draw a sketch for each of three gratitudes and a short description of what I’m grateful for.

The idea is you don’t write big gratitudes, but little ones so you don’t feel put off by not having a big enough thing to write about. So on one day I wrote that the traffic lights were on green and I got to the doctors in time. For that I drew the traffic lights. Another could be that the cat came up and was very loving. I drew a curled up cat. Finally I wanted something else to write, and the plants in the garden were lovely so I wrote that and drew some flowers.

I have continued to do this each day, sometimes I forget, but it’s a good habit for me to keep to and it has helped me to keep things together. So if I’ve forgotten I will catch it up. It’s become that important to me. It’s going to mean a lot of gratitude sketchbooks though if I carry on!

Canal boat

Photo taken outside Etruria Industrial museum. This is not a colourful tourist boat. Painted with castles and roses. But careful lines have been painted on it to delineate it’s shape. I think its part of the industrial museum exhibit? Perhaps it was used in the past to transport the flint and bone that had been ground into fine powder at the Jessie Shirley flint mill. This is the main part of the industrial museum. A stationery steam engine called Princess was used to provide power to do the grinding. The boat or barge might have transported the powder to the local potteries to add to clay and produce fine bone China pottery. So much history in this city of ours.

Cat in the hedge

Shall I paint him?

Peeping out, watching the traffic, avoiding dog walkers, he sits and waits for us to get out of the car. Then he’s on the doorstep waiting to come in for his tea.

My other cats have their habits too, my little queen stretches up and claws my knee every time she says hello. I always say ouch, but she’s not bothered. She won’t stop. Just a friendly miew…

The other Tom likes me to Stoke his head, all the way down his back to his tail, as I reach the end his head comes back up again for the next sweep of my hand, over and over, 20 or 30 times…

The three of them are so loving. I enjoy their company. X

A quiet bench…

Bench at Westport lake last year. It was taken on a drizzly day like today. It’s good to see the weeping willow tree a bit further round the lake sweeping like a curtain across the side of the waters edge. It brings back memories of another one I knew….

I used to hide under a weeping willow when I was a child. It stood on its own in a park and I would sit with my back against it and imagine I was in a green tent or hiding behind a green waterfall. I had many adventurous thoughts sitting there in peace and quiet.

Relaxing on a bench is good when you have a view like this at Westport. After you have walked half a mile it’s nice to stop for a chat. Or a sandwich and a cup of tea. Refreshed and calm you can carry on with your walk. By the way there is a bench appreciation society page on Facebook for those that are interested….

Cutting down power usage

Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?

We have an old car, it’s about 23 years old (not as old as the morris in the painting), we can’t afford to replace it. But don’t really want to because of all the resources locked up in it. We only drive short distances now and did less than 1000 miles last year. I rarely have to fill it up with fuel. For local trips we usually walk. It’s a struggle to carry things, but it’s exercise.

I have a bike but I’m too wobbly to use it. But it may well be given to a charity so it can be reused, it would be good to give it to a good home. You only have a short window of adulthood to be adventurous but as you get older it gets harder. My mind is mostly fine but my body is getting worn out and ill.

Apart from that we planted a lot of trees on our garden which have become mature over the years. I’m sure that must offset our carbon footprint. We try and grow some fruit and vegetables too. We also try not to use much gas and electricity. We rarely buy clothes or shoes…..

I could go on. I don’t feel deprived. I’ve never flown and don’t want to and I rarely travel more than the occasional 80 miles to visit relatives. I hope all of this is a good way towards living a sustainable life. We could do more, we try.

Skyline

One way to emphasise something is to get down low so the object or objects show up against the sky. Usually the idea is to have two thirds sky to one third land, or vice versa, but this is split halfway. The spiky seed heads show up nicely and there is subtle colour and texture in the bottom half of the photo. Sometimes I will choose portrait orientation but this was definitely best in landscape.

Abstracting or adding?

What has this become? Duplicated, added filters, texture, sharpness. Mixed and muddled. Colourful, like false colour terrain. You can have a lot of fun with digital art. I feel like I’m flying over a mad landscape, rather like in 2001 a space oddessy when Dave Bowman flies through an alien landscape near the end of the film. What fun a bit psychedelic! x

Earthquake, what Earthquake?

Richter scale

/ˈrɪktə/

noun

GEOLOGY

  1. a numerical scale for expressing the magnitude of an earthquake on the basis of seismograph oscillations. The more destructive earthquakes typically have magnitudes between about 5.5 and 8.9; it is a logarithmic scale and a difference of one represents an approximate thirtyfold difference in magnitude.

Last night around 8pm there was a small earthquake near Tean in Staffordshire. It registered 3.3 on the richter scale, and houses near to it felt a jolt and their windows rattled.

My friend just asked if we felt anything? No, we didn’t feel a thing. We probably get more shaking from traffic driving past our house. Apparently the UK gets about a thousand earthquake s or tremors a year, and most are only 1 or 2 on the richter scale (or 30 or 900? times smaller). So although 3.3 is high in the UK it’s not bad. I think we may have had a 5 a few years ago.

I couldn’t find an image to use so I drew a ‘geological’ abstract instead, trying to draw something like a fracture or fault moving in the rocks below us….