P365 - Day 315 - eleven

Yeah I know, time is a human construct, and it isn’t really 2011 anyway because a few years got skipped over a few centuries ago, and it’s just a normal day and a normal minute, and who really cares because the same time will happen in 24 different time zones of the course of the day, twice if you don’t use 24 hour time.

But even so, I think 11.11 on 11.11.11 is kind of cool.

I heard about the 11eleven project from Lil Sis.

 Its aim is to get everyone recording, tweeting, blogging, telling stories, making movies, taking photos . . . all on the same day. From everyone’s contributions, the organisers are going to create a photo book, a documentary and a music collection. There were 11 suggested themes to get you started, but really they said to record

anything that gives us an insight into your world and your perspective…..what do you want us to know about your life on planet earth?

In one sense, I guess it really doesn’t matter which day it is – the point is that everyone’s doing it at the same time. But 11.11.11 is as good a day as any, right?

My plan was to do something I’d wanted to do for a while – that is to take a photo on the hour every hour for the whole day. No matter what I was doing, I’d have to stop for a couple of seconds and take a picture (there might have been a couple of activities I’d possibly have excluded from that).

Since 11.11 is a Friday, I thought it would be a really good day for this project, since there’d be school dropoffs, work, a possible walk in the park, school pickups, scrapbooking night, a couple of beers when I got home . . . a pretty varied day.

But no, I had to get sick didn’t I? So I was at home all day thinking how incredibly boring my ‘day in the life of’ project was going to be.

I didn’t much feel like being creative either, so I decided that, in the spirit of my iPhone Project 365, I’d do the whole day’s photos on my phone.

So, while it’s not really what I wanted to do, here is 11.11.11 (#11ElevenLive) through my eyes. (I used Instagram for all photos except the 11:11 photo and the same filter - Earlybird - on each photo. I'm not sure why. Consistency seemed like a good idea at the time, but I don't know if it really works for all of the photos.)

0600 - the first thing I saw when I woke up

0700 - loungeroom mess and ABC News 24

0800  - coffee

0900 - my day as seen through my phone

1000 - cold & flu herbal tea

1100 - Lest We Forget. A minute's silence

11:11 on 11.11.11

12:00 - playing around with our holiday photos

1300 - dragging myself out to get supplies

1400 - a movie I haven't seen for years

1500 - still watching the movie

1600 - the family arrives home with the mail and my
scrapbooking/journal goodies have arrived

1700 - bringing the washing in that's been out since Tuesday

1800 - flicking through the yoga magazine I bought
while I was out. I really want to do this.

1900 - evening sky

2000 - a quick trip to my little bit of the garden.
I can't wait until I transform it into my little piece of paradise

2100 - blogging about 11/11/11

I suppose if I had to fit this set of photos into any of the project’s 11 topics (which I don’t think you have to) it would be ‘routine’ – or  the disruption thereof. That’s what happens when you get sick.

There was also the option to blog about "How do I wish the world will be in 100 years", but being at a low creative ebb, I haven't given that topic very much thought. It's an interesting challenge though.

Anyway, potentially I have two more photos to take tonight to round off 11.11.11. If I stay awake long enough, I'll take them and post them.

If not, goodnight :)

Later

Still here ...

2200 - I love that he came home from school with a
remembrance poppy today

2300 - a full moon and a very bright star

2311 - the 11:11 screen shot I missed this morning

P365 - Day 301 - waiting in the car

The view from the car while Juniordwarf and I were waiting for Slabs to finish his errrands.

Also, I wrecked my journal a bit more today. And these were ideas I came up with myself - not instructions from the book.

Backing the car over it

Pigstabbering it

P365 - Day 299 - wreck this journal

Earlier this year I bought a book called Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith.

The subtitle of the book is ‘To Create Is To Destroy’. Bascially it is, as the name suggests, a book that you are supposed to wreck. Each page has an instruction for something you’re supposed to do to the page or to the whole book in order to destroy it.

A couple of examples are ‘poke holes in this page using a pencil’, ‘sew this page’, and ‘create a non-stop line’. You are also supposed to cut through the book, take it for a walk tied on a piece of string, and take it in the shower with you.

The point of the book is to let yourself go a bit crazy, do things to a book that you simply don’t do to books, have fun, and get over the ‘blank page syndrome’ that people like me often face when we sit down to try and create something. It’s an attempt to get yourself unstuck from your creative rut.

I’m sure the concept of destroying a brand new book doesn’t appeal to everyone, but for me it’s been a bit of fun. I’ve been putting off some of the more destructive tasks, and also some that require a bit of thought, but I’ve noticed as I’ve been working through the book – not in order, of course – that I’ve started to get a bit more reckless with it and am happily making more of a mess than I did when I started.

Today I decided to drop the journal from a high place. The highest place I have easy access to (other than my work building, where I understand dropping things off the roof is strictly forbidden) is a second storey balcony, so that had to do.

Dropping it didn’t cause as much damage to the book as I’d hoped, but it was kind of cool to see it flying through the air for a couple of seconds.

The instruction. It doesn't say how high!

Ready . . .  set . . . 

Go!

Bye!

Safely landed.

I wonder what I should attempt tomorrow.

P365 - Day 226 - project life

This week I was very excited to learn that pre-orders for Project Life were now open.

This is the second year I’ve done this project, and I use it for most of my photos. I still scrapbook the special occasions and the photos I love, but for most of the day-to-day stuff, this approach is so much easier.

I’ve fallen a bit behind in my 2011 Project Life album. I’ve kept fairly up to date with the photos, but need to catch up with my journalling. At the start of the week, I still had to fill in most of the journal cards from March, April, June and July.

My approach has been different to the ‘photo a day’ approach that a lot of people take with this product. This page explains what I’m doing with it.

As a result, my album is more complicated, because I don’t always know what pictures are going to make it into the album, and how many photos of an event I’m going to use. With the photo a day approach, you can write your journal cards any time and slot them in the album, even before you’ve printed the photos. My approach means I can’t really fill in any cards until I know how the page spread is going to look, and I don’t know how the spread will look until the end of the month when I can sort through all the photos I’ve taken that month and decided which ones to print. So it’s become very easy to fall behind.

However, seeing the new kits are about to be released has given me some momentum to get my album up to date. I’ve spent quite a lot of time this week filling in the cards and getting it all organised. Now all I have to do is a few days from June, one day from April and all of July. Progress indeed!

I also want to put the spreads on my blog at the end of each month. I was originally going to put them all one page and update that each month, but I can see that would get very big by the end of the year. 

Instead I’ll probably just do one post for each month’s spreads as I complete them. (Or more likely, as I get around to photographing them, which is a whole other process. So far, January is all I’ve managed to do.)

Juniordwarf loves looking at the albums. He calls last year’s album ‘the red photos’ (because the binder is red) and this year’s is ‘the blue photos’.

Today he looked through both albums, and we talked about all the pictures, who was in them and what was happening. He had lots of questions (many of which started with “why?”) about what was in the photos, what had happened afterwards, where we were, what we were doing and so on. I love how he takes such an interest in them.

That’s one of the great things about Project Life: how easy it is to display all our photos. If I’d tried to scrapbook all of the photos I wanted to since starting in 2010, I’d probably be lucky to be up to March last year. Plus I can let Juniordwarf look at them without worrying he's going to damage one of my scrapbook layouts. If a couple of photos get dislodged and wrecked, it's simple to replace them.

These albums and kits are fantastic, and I plan to continue using them for as long as Becky Higgins keeps putting them out.

P365 - Day 124 milestone journal

I mentioned Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project earlier this year. It’s a great book and I’ve been following Gretchen’s blog for a while, but have to admit that I haven’t been putting a lot of the strategies into practice.

One idea I recently came across on the Happiness Project blog was the ‘milestone journal’. The idea is basically that you get a nice book, have a page for each day of the year, and then every time something significant or really important happens in your life, you note it down, and the year, on the page with the corresponding date.

That way you have a record of all the really big moments of your life.  

According to Gretchen, there are studies that show that one way to increase your happiness now is to reflect on happy memories of the past. She suggests this as a way to keep that information all in one place so that you can easily remember what happened ‘on this day’.

I rather liked this idea, so I’ve decided to try it out.

Being the lazy creature I am, I didn’t fancy writing the date on the top of 366 pages in a notebook, so I looked for an ‘Any Year Diary’, which has done all that work for me. (It's a pretty unattractive book, so I’m planning on making a nice arty looking cover for it, and will possibly use some of my scrapbooking stash to make the pages look pretty. However, this is apparently the only one of its kind available. It’s obviously not a particularly sought-after item.) 

It brings back memories of the little lockable diary I used to have when I was a kid - without the lock.

Now my only decision is whether to start it from now, or go back through my old journals (which I’ve been keeping since I was about ten) and fill it up with significant moments from my whole life.

I think that would be kind of fun to do.