birthday celebrations

I'm going to have to start calling Wednesday "Slump Day." Because Sunday is my Monday, and Thursday is my Friday, Wednesday can't really be "Hump Day" for me. That's reserved for Tuesday. I seem to get rolling pretty well for 3 days and then Wednesday I run out of steam for awhile.

Today I'm slumping. Maybe it's "abstainer's regret" for the homemade birthday cake I passed on at work yesterday. It's a good thing I didn't know it was homemade when it was offered or I'm sure I would have stuffed my face with a nice thick slice of sugar-saturated texture with cream cheese frosting, causing that blissful state known among most office workers as "cake stupor."

I'm trying to avoid processed sugar as much as possible since diabetes runs in my family and I'd like to avoid the condition, but it's hard to do when you work in an office where there are more than 120 employees. Chances are good that it's someone's birthday every other day or at least that there's a birthday every week. The office in which I work is big on birthdays and birthday cakes. Someone tried to offset the constant birthday celebrations by having one office-wide celebration each month to honor that month's birthday people, but instead of reducing the mini-celebrations among departments, it's only given people another excuse to avoid work for 10 or 15 minutes while they chow down yet another run-of-the-mill mass-produced crisco-laden confection from Costco. I had to draw the line somewhere so unless my craving for a sugar high is unbearable I say "NO" to birthday cakes. I was sorry to miss a real homemade cake though; it's a rare treat these days.

The page from my art journal is another experiment. I copied an image I liked (the little girl) and created several pages in different color schemes to compare the results. I realized that I had a mindset that told me each page I make should be completely different from anything else I had ever done and this is my attempt to break that mindset. Each page doesn't have to start with a unique element. If you look at works by Lynne Perrella or Teesha Moore you can see that they use favorite elements over and over. You can use the same element many times with unique results.