Day 21: Nourish

Today’s little change was to make a myself, party of one, a meal that I associate with feeding a crowd. On the menu? Pot roast, sauteed lacinato kale, glazed carrots, roasted fingerling potatoes, and cake from the other day for dessert.

It’s been a long year of meals prepared and eaten in solitude, I needed this.

Whether I chalk this up to wanting to hang out in the kitchen for a few hours or wanting to sit down to a comforting meal, the outcome is the same. I feel nourished.

Day 20: Mystery

More of a mystery for you than it is for me!

I spent the better part of today working on what the next phase of this whole blogging thing might look like.

Stay tuned :)

Day 19: Cake

I’m writing this just as the familiar sweet and spicy scent of carrot cake starts to fill my apartment.

When I added “make a cake just because” to my list, I suppose the intent was to evoke a celebratory mood, and this morning, when I picked this little change off my list, that was very much how I was framing it in my mind. This was going to be about celebrating no particular occasion. This was going to be about eating the cake. This was about the end product.

Silly me. I should know better by now! After all, the whole premise of this blog is that the process is the celebration (I’ll get into this in more depth soon, I promise).

I tend to write these posts late in the day, but I think it’s important that I clarify that I started writing this just before 10 pm and the cake had gone in the oven only a few minutes prior. Rather late by a baker’s standards. I could have started much earlier in the evening, but there was no sense of urgency to bake, ice, and eat a cake today. I really just wanted to spend some time in my kitchen baking something for no particular occasion. And so I did.

Besides, cake is way better for breakfast.

Day 18: Ask

Today’s little change was a bit different. Initially, I had planned to sit down and do some research about something that I’m curious about but haven’t had a chance to dedicate a good block of time to. Spoiler alert: I’m keeping that on my list for the month, so you may see it appear here soon.

Instead, for who knows what reason, I decided that I would rather ask someone that I know extremely well to tell me something about them that I don’t already know. No pressure to answer, no interrogation to follow, no need for an extremely personal answer, anything goes. Just something intentionally new.

I’m grateful for (and amused by) the answer I got, I’m glad I asked, I’ll ask again, I’ll continue to ask others, etc.

Day 17: Automatic

I train for art like I train for sports, or is it the other way around? I don’t know. In any case, today’s little change was to do some timed automatic drawing. Some interval training.

When I added this to my list of things that I wanted to do this month, I added it for two reasons; the first was that although this is something I really enjoy doing on paper, it’s not something I’ve experimented with too much in the digital realm. So many options at my fingertips all at once! Where would my brain go? The second reason was that although this is something I’ve been researching a lot lately, I haven’t actually been doing as much of it as I’d like. So, in the interest of switching into production mode, here I am.

Setting a timer didn’t feel right, so I decided to use songs as the blocks of time I’d dedicate to each drawing. Initially I had considered doing this in silence so that I wouldn’t be influenced by the music, but I think this was the right call. I took short breaks between drawings to jump between genres of music depending on where my head was at after I completed a drawing. If that didn’t feel right, I let the music play on and started a new drawing.

This was a nice little challenge to give myself – I spent much more time than I had planned on it. Definitely something that is hard to stop doing once you get started.