I realized this week that I haven’t had the energy or inspiration for “art” in several months.  My blog-babble friend, NRKII, is taking a break from her writer’s blog, and it made me take another look at my output and motivations.

While I still have the desire to write, I have completely lost the ability to even consider picking up a brush.  Still, I was thinking I “had” to — or “ought” to…  and it was making me miserable.

So I am officially on hiatus from card making, art projects or any other crafty projects for the time being.  I need to regain the energy and enthusiasm so it’s fun, something I wake up looking forward to, instead of waking up in the middle of the night dreading.

Would I take a break if I were making any money from these projects?  Probably not.  If I were making money from it (and needed the money), then I would push through the discomfort somehow.  Just as, every day, millions of people around the world go to jobs they don’t enjoy (if they ever did) because they need the money.

But I don’t make money from cards (other than things I “sold” to my mother — how pathetic is that?).  Or paintings.  Which has been fine, I have painted for the love of it.

And when I love it again, I will go back to it.

This is a cool website.

Improve your English vocabulary — and do something good for people who have need.

Free Rice.

It works a little like the old word association tests in school. They give you one word, then you choose the closest equivalent from four others. If you get it right three times in a row, they bump you up a level; if you get a word wrong you go down a level until you are hovering pretty close to the sort of language you use and understand easily.

Note to non-native speakers: as you get higher up in the levels, you will run into more words that are not in common use except by people who study specific subjects (history, science, medicine are the ones I have noted so far).

I am going to start a new category on my blog. Sometimes, as I am reading “stuff” I see things that I don’t really want to blog about, but I think you would find interesting. Here, you will discover quotes, articles or other things that generally fall into one of the categories I often write about, but that isn’t my own work.

Up first, from the Natural History magazine we get along with our Pacific Science Center membership, is a blurb from “Blue Planet Blues,” the first article in Water, the Wellspring of Life (November 2007, volume 116, number 9, page 29):

Despite all the water in the world, only a small fraction is available to us and other species that depend on freshwater. Salty seas account for more than 97 percent of the water on Earth. Of the remaining 3 percent or so, at least two-thirds is tied up in glaciers, ice caps, and permafrost, or else lies deep underground, of little use to those of us living on the land above. ~ Eleanor J Sterling

This entire issue of the magazine is devoted to water: its sources, scarcity and conservation. How do we balance our needs for water with the needs of the rest of the planet?