fear of failure: blogjam and laser show

Laser show, Brisbane festival

Late again - I had been thinking a lot about trying the challenge of posting everyday for a week - thinking so much in fact that I forgot to do my usual weekly post. However, the theme for today is suitable - (fear of) failure.

The chooks ate well last night - a food experiment based on leftovers went wrong. I must remember to follow recipes and not improvise so much with 2 day old root vegetables. I may have gotten away with it, if I hadn't used beetroot, but that pink coloured bubble and squeak mocked me somehow as it sat in the frying pan - not a meal I could believe in. 

The nice thing about chooks (as well as the eggs) is they are not too fussy about what they eat, as long as it contains calories and/or chlorophyll. I have been picking weeds for them on my morning walks. This is because they are now banned from free-ranging to protect the new vege bed. Hopefully one day soon we will have a chook tractor for them to roam around the garden in, getting some green stuff and fertilising the ground, without decimating the crop. They seem to like the weeds but they prefer pink bubble and squeak. They are not dumb. One woman's mistake is six chooks' feast....

Brisbane city lights, from South Bank

Another area I can stuff up in easily is painting. I would love to have the skills to paint something (ok, a painting, not a wall) I can be happy with. I have been trying to complete a piece for the art therapy conference exhibition in November. I think I messed it up the other day.  I reached this familiar point, where I thought it was going well, but I went too far and now I am thinking I need to paint over it and start again. The theme is recovery from disaster, suitably enough.

I definitely need more skills, and this comes from informed practice (10,000 hours to be really proficient at something), but at the moment, the more I practice, the more discouraged I become. I think I need to go to a painting class or have some coaching or something. But that would involve exposure. Perhaps its worth it as I often think about wanting to enjoy painting (yes, the product as well as the process, sorry art therapists) - that would be a change I could believe in.

No 3

The laser show at South Bank on Sunday (and every night, for another week) was cool. It started 20 minutes late, but we were also running late, so it didn't matter. What a warm night, and its only early Spring.

more later.