The password is... procrastination

After spending 30 minutes writing and rewriting tonight's blog post about my trip to Little Rock last Saturday and the Craft Gossip Blog meet up, I've given up and changed courses. It's not that I have nothing to write about, quite the opposite actually, it's just that I'm having trouble doing my homework. I'll write the following post in an attempt to at least be somewhat productive with my procrastination.

I spend all day coming up with creative solutions to everyday problems and when I get home, my brain is empty.

Thankfully no one is grading me on this homework and the most brilliant blog post will come to me (hopefully sometime tomorrow).

As usual, I've been thinking. I've had a terrible time trying to balance my day job with my night job. In a match up of performing arts event management vs. fiber arts, who do you think wins? My first instinct is to say the former. I depend on that job to keep my brain on its toes, to pay my bills, to advance me to a world of happy, professional bliss. It's easy to devote my time and energy on something like that. However, when I get home, my wool, spinning wheels and knitting needles taunt me. The names they call me when I'm not looking are enough to be sent to the corner for. My every growing fiber stash is just that, ever growing, never shrinking. It looms over me casting a shadow on what is just a shell of my formerly crafty self. Perhaps it is all of those things that leave the fiber arts in the winners circle.

I've felt it taking a bit out of me. I'm not as friendly in the evening when I'm not playing with wool. I get crabby, short and uninteresting. I need to make time to balance the two out once again. Everyone with a professional day job probably experiences the difficulties in leaving your work at work. It's impossible to do these days. Our brains are functioning at a million miles a minute (I blame the internet on that - information is just a click away, so productivity and reactions to problems are expected to mirror that) and it's all too easy to answer email after email in the evening when you should be detoxing and unwinding. You certainly aren't doing a service to your professional colleagues by never resetting and you certainly aren't doing one for yourself.

So, how do I begin to balance the two out again? As I said above, I'm having trouble with one homework assignment, so I'm not even going to pretend that "scheduled crafty time" is the solution. It has to come in the form of inspiration, but not in the form of time suck. For example - a walk through a local art gallery or botanical garden = inspiration; 3 hours spent browsing Pinterest for new Christmas craft ideas = time suck. Both are fun, both have different results for me.

Okay, okay, so maybe I will assign myself a homework project - I'll go find some inspiration this week. All I need is a breath of fresh air to reset myself. I know my coworkers and my fiber stash will thank me.

Balance is not that far out of reach.