July 14 - Starting over

Today I decided to pull the trigger on several lines of thought I've been hashing over in my head lately. About 6 weeks ago, I accepted a Software Engineer position at the same company where I've been doing software support for the last year. Since then, I've been kind of free falling. My shift starts an hour earlier, I'm not playing World of Warcraft right now, and I find I'm wasting a lot of time on YouTube. Meanwhile, I miss being creative and I have goals gathering dust on the shelf. 

One solution is to start blogging again. I enjoy writing, and I like the community aspect of blogging. Thankfully Thorns Have Roses turned into something of a running blog. I do still run, and just finished working out a training plan for a marathon in October of 2014. However, I do more than run, and I don't want to my blog to focus on only one thing. I moved to Jan[et] Cicelia partially because there are other blogs named Thankful Thorns have Roses, and partially because this is a new format for me, with a new approach toward content. 

I want my blog to not only report on what I'm doing, but also drive and motivate me to do more. One of the ways I hope to accomplish this is by posting my artwork daily. The image above is what I accomplished today. Granted, it doesn't currently look like much, but it will. I'm teaching myself a graphics program called Blender. The plan to is to put in at least 15 minutes per day, and post my progress regularly. Today I learned  how to control the object: how to rotate, size, and change perspective on the plane.

I also want my blog to be a positive place. I don't want to make excuses for why my art looks the way it does, or why my runs went the way they did. The plan is to focus on what I did well and what I can improve on. So for today's piece, I did well to run through the tutorial twice, practicing each tidbit as it was discussed. The obvious improvement would be to actually create something more than the box the program automatically starts with. I'm looking forward to seeing how quickly I can get there.

I've been spending time on Reddit lately, and thoroughly enjoy the Today I Learned (TIL) posts. Well, today I laughed when I saw a pickup truck driving down the freeway. I know we've all held our hands out the car window, waving up and down as the air current flowed over and under. This pickup had four arms sticking out the windows, all moving with the air currents. It looked like it had wings! The best part? All four arms were adult, and heavily tattooed.