Thursday, April 13, 2006

Time to think

Drip edge
Drip edge,
originally uploaded by Mikey720.
I'm still on holiday, so I suspect it will be next week before I get around to a more on topic post.

What I should have been doing while on holiday is marking. What I've mostly been doing is painting, so here are some paining related stories...

First of all I painted a sort of porch bit at our front door. There I was, up a ladder, listening to my iPod when my wife the English teacher and daughter number 2 arrived home from the shops. I took one earphone out to hear what they were saying. When I went to plug it back in my ear, I discovered I had dropped it straight into the tin of black exterior gloss I was holding. Scunner! What is it with me and earphones? (Read this post and see the Darth Tater photo for the full story of what happened to myfirst set of earphones.) I managed to clean up the earphone with white spirit, but the foamy bit that goes in your ear was wrecked. Thankfully Koss give you a couple of spares with the earphones, so I was able to plug myself back in without any further financial outlay!

I have now moved inside and I am painting in the kitchen. While I work inside I generally listen to the radio, but just for a wee change I decided to listen to the director's commentary on a couple of DVDs that I've not heard yet. My wife the English teacher will suffer watching endless Star Trek films with me, but draws the line at watching them with the commentary on! So there I was, painting away and listening to the Nicholas Meyer talking about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and thinking that he seemed to be a bit of a numpty (allegedly - just in case Mr Meyer's lawyers are reading) when he talked about needing time to be creative. He said that the money people in the film industry didn't always seem to appreciate this. He said something along the lines of needing to spend time in the bath, staring at your toes, because that's where the real work is done. Brilliant!

Am I working while writing and reading blogs? Am I doing educational stuff while paint the kitchen? Sometimes I'm just staring at my toes, but sometimes I'm doing real work.

Whatever else I'm doing, I have to stop now and get back to painting the kitchen!

4 comments:

Edward Ott said...

best ideas come while just sitting there staring at my coffee.

Peace

Christine McIntosh said...

Ah - but is it work to blog when one has retired from paid employ and when one's work might be seen as doing Martha-esque tasks such as washing the beloved's shirts and making sure there is bread for breakfast?
Blogging seems more like fun, somehow ....

Duncan__ said...

... about needing time to be creative.
The late, great Carl Sagan once said something about the value of day-dreaming: "Without imagination, we go nowhere". Keep dreaming!

David said...

There's a good story about Carl Sagan and the code name for a Macintosh computer. If you remind me, I'll tell you it some time... if you don't already know it.